Quotes About Reflection

Johnson insisted, "I don't want this symposium to come here and spend two days talking about what we have done, the progress has been much too small. We haven't done nearly enough. I'm kind of ashamed of myself that I had six years and couldn't do more than I did.

One journalist complemented another that his article on a dispute, had made both sides see themselves as they are.

In the reflected gaze of his (her husband's) steady admiration, she saw the face of the girl he had fallen in love with.

If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do and how to do it.

Teddy Roosevelt had relished every hour of every day as president. Indeed, (he was) fearing the dull thud he would experience upon returning to private life.

There I go When my heart all worn by grief Sinketh low. Where my baseless hopes do lie There to find my peace, go I. Sad and slow . . 

What fired in Lincoln this furious and fertile time of self-improvement? The answer lay in his readiness to gaze in the mirror and soberly scrutinize himself. Taking stock, he found himself wanting. From the beginning, young Lincoln aspired to nothing less than to inscribe his name into the book of communal memory.

Find time and space in which to think. As Lincoln began to survey the darkening landscape of the war and consider a new strategy regarding slavery, he needed time to reflect upon both the constitutionality and the ramifications of issuing an emancipation order.

We should constantly be reminded of what we owe in return for what we have.

Through the last days of May and the early days of June, Eleanor

What is well-spoken must be yoked to what is well-thought. And such thought is the product of great labor, "the drudgery of the law.

There is now nothing left for me except to try to so live as not to dishonor the memory of those I loved who have gone before me.

How children dance," Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "to the unlived lives of their parents

Lyndon was his father's shadow and replica.

When he came upon a passage that Struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there until he did get paper," she recalled, "and then he would rewrite it" and keep it in a scrapbook so that he could preserve it.

acknowledge errors and learn from

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, How could you have believed that? because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.

The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.

So much of my life has been twisted and painful that now when happiness floods right through me like being flooded over with warm glittering blue water, I can't believe it. I say to myself: I am Anna Wulf, this is me, Anna, and I'm happy.

We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.

Sometimes I dislike women I dislike us all because of our capacity for not thinking when it suits us...

A hundred things to do, but only one thing to be, he said, obstinately. But perhaps I don't feel myself worthy of such a wealth of opportunity?

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. (So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if ...)