Quotes About Reflection

Solitude is as needed to the imagination as society is wholesome to the character.

There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us!

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

Suddenly all the sky is hid As with the shutting of a lid, One by one great drops are falling Doubtful and slow, Down the pane they are crookedly crawling, And the wind breathes low; Slowly the circles widen on the river, Widen and mingle, one and all; Here and there the slenderer flowers shiver, Struck by an icy rain-drop's fall.

My soul is not a palace of the past...

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, Their birthright high and holy A mountain-stream that ends in mud Methinks is melancholy.

A wise man travels to discover himself.

The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.

The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or by the handle.

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

Time doesn't fly. It just never stops. And the next thing you know, it's now." --from "Diary of a Company Man

I once read a story by this guy named Harlan Ellison ending: That night it rained, everywhere in the known universe. I was never too sure what the ending meant in terms of Ellison's story, but anyone who sits alone in a motel room for hours, watching the rain wash the world away, begins to understand. Knows what it feels like.

memory will cut you off at the knees if you let it.

Bright Segment" -that's it. If I'm our lives we have one or two of those, one or two bright segments, Doc thought, we're fortunate. Most don't. And the rest wasn't silence, like that opera, I Pagliacci, said. The rest was just noise.

Bright Segment" -that's it. If in our lives we have one or two of those, one or two bright segments, Doc thought, we're fortunate. Most don't. And the rest wasn't silence, like that opera, I Pagliacci, said. The rest was just noise.

We live in snow globes, don't we? Pick them up, shake them, years swirl about us and settle.

Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one's life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future.