Quotes About Reflection

He did not want to live. As the condition of life does, so the condition of death should depend on one's choice. The wise man lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can. Democrites fell on his sword; Aruntius killed himself to fly both the past and the future; Crates said that love would be cured by hunger, if not by time; and whoever disliked these two remedies, by a rope.

The beauty of worthy things is not in the face but in the backside, endearing more by their departure than their address.

Philippa thinks of you, as she thinks of me, as a rather run-down institution for indigent imbeciles.

In a lifetime of empty rooms, this was another.

He lived in her, his disciple. For her to think, now, as he would have done. And to act always thereafter.

It's time you thought less of your emotional feather bed and more of other people's.

Level-headed and constructive to the end,' Philippa said, 'in confronting all your personal problems. And now? A trifle of hemlock?

If I did not know how to live, I shall know how to die.

It is not advisable to crow. It might be oneself next time.

Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius, or why worry about tomorrow, when your funeral is today. Goodbye.

What we choose to do then is nothing?' said Lymond, and his face was not pleasant. 'I have taken far too long as it is to face the consequences of my actions. You must not unlearn me my lesson. I have several other tests, still more acid, to pass.

Why not? I thought we were speaking of death and dishonour? You would advance to your grave and I should join the ranks of your numerous dead: Diccon and Salablanca, Tosh and Christian Stewart; Oonagh; Will Scott and his father; Turkey Mat and Tom Erskine; the dog Luadhas; the child Khaireddin.… What shall I say to your son when I meet him? Don't be surprised: your sire loved me also?'

He and Richard had met on the strand at Philorth and like the sand under their feet, all the muddled solicitude which had prompted that journey had in five minutes dispersed through their fingers.

Mother of God, Francis Crawford of Lymond, you've made a slut of your art, have you not, as well as a whore of yourself?

There is little you cannot already guess. You know now what you want. You are about to learn how to give. But the hardest lesson of all is accepting. Am I not right?

If I had killed you, none of this would have happened.' 'I thought you would realize it sooner or later,' Lymond said.

He had ridden through the night, without rest and without sleep, for this. It ought, surely, to give someone a moment of wry amusement. He understood—but then he had always understood—how Richard had felt at Philorth.

Don't you think they would all have been happier if Francis Crawford had never existed?

I showed you your face in the mirror. It was not only the face of one who loves, but the face of one whose love is returned.

If one believes in God, but has learned not to pray, one offers only, in silence, one's apologies, and then asks the spirit to do what it can.

I am trying to go back. I thought, believe it or not, that nothing could stop me from going back. I was wrong.

She could say that no longer. She was his wife in nothing but name: the privacies of his nature were not hers to explore and to analyse: she kept him as far as possible out of her thoughts, and conjecture out of his affairs. Leaving him was less like leaving even the most simple of her friends in Flaw Valleys, and more like losing unfinished a manuscript, beautiful, absorbing and difficult, which she had long wanted to read.

Quel changement, Strozzi had said, and it was true. The change was there, and not only in the chamois and lawn, replacing the velvet, the rubies, the gold tissue. It was as if all about him had been stripped down and cleansed and reduced, without blurring, to its true structure. And his eyes, which were smiling, were clear.

A mind responsive to beauty is a storehouse with many rooms; words, sounds, textures, all the nobler exercises of the senses leave some image filed and folded to be summoned at need. There, too, the brutal images are kept: the sights and smells and hurts, real and imagined, which the responsive mind accepts and has bedded deep.