Quotes About Reflection

His horse stumbled in the tussocky ground and made him realize, then, how thoughtlessly fast he was riding...how thoughtlessly fast he was thinking.

It had been a boy's trick, Jerott remembered. Standing bareback on your father's horses; somersaulting, chariot-riding. Francis, buried in books, had never publicly attempted it. What private practice, Jerott wondered fleetingly, had gone into that?

You're indecent.' Tobie dragged down his shirt. 'It reflects my state of mind,' he said.

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.

If life was like a body of water, she had asked that she be allowed to walk again in its shallows; instead she had been abruptly seized by strong currents and pushed into deep water.

Maybe everyone lives with terror every minute of every day and buries it, never stopping long enough to look. Or maybe it's just me. I'm speaking here of your ordinary basic terrors like the meaning of life or what if there's no meaning at all...Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know .

But this was exactly the age, she thought, when life ought to be spent, not hoarded. There had been enough years of comfortable living, and complacency was nothing but delusion. One could not always change the world, she felt, but one could change oneself.

I always have a quotation for everything--it saves original thinking.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

And then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the silence between quarter- and quarter-chime.

He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart. Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain.

although we often succeed in teaching our pupils subjects, we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.

Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face, however difficult it may be.

The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come.

in the first part, the master-faculties are Observation and Memory, so in the second, the master-faculty is the Discursive Reason.

After all, he thinks conscience is a sort of vermiform appendix. Chop it out and you'll feel all the better.

Five minutes' practice before the glass every day, and you will soon acquire that vacant look so desirable for all rogues, detectives and Government officials.

Well, it's no good jumping at conclusions." "Jump? You don't even crawl distantly within sight of a conclusion.

Did you want to be a missionary in your youth? I did. I think most kids do some time or another, which is odd, seein´ how unsatisfactory most of us turn out.

his thoughts revolving silently in this squirrel-cage of mystification.

Do you find it easy to get drunk on words? So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober. Lord Peter Wimsey in Gaudy Night

Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face, however difficult it may be." CHAPTER XVI From noise of scare-fires rest ye free, From Murders Benedicite.

Boil my brains!" said Lord Peter. "Boil 'em and mash 'em and serve 'em up with butter as a dish of turnips, for it's damn well all they're fit for! Look at me!