Quotes About Reflection

You can never turn the clock back and, since we're talking about mental health, I would stress that.

just failing is not the key; the key is to be systematically learning from failures.

When you hold the world in your palm and inspect it only from a bird's-eye view, you tend to become arrogant— you do not realize that things get blurred when seen from an enormous distance," Yunus wrote.

The plucked and dressed bodies of the chickens will then be sold to millions of families who will gnaw on their bones without pausing for an instant to think that they are eating the dead body of a once living creature, or to ask what was done to that creature in order to enable them to buy and eat its body.

Sin embargo, dado que entre intelectuales nunca creo en "malentendidos" (esto es diferente en el caso de las personas ingenuas), sino que sistemáticamente parto de lecturas falsas intencionales, es decir, de reflejos condicionados de segundo grado, me parece razonable investigar los motivos de las interpretaciones erróneas evidentes. Por el momento, me limito al caso de Münkler

Wer komplexe Wirklichkeit leugnet, gibt sich gern objektiv und bezichtigt die Problembewussten der Wirklichkeitsflucht und der Träumerei.

The disciple of philosophy must present itself, first as a way of thinking and then as a way of life.

The notion of private ideas had no ground in [prehistoric] emotional experience.... The notion of a private interior in which the subject can close the door behind it, reflect upon and express itself was unknown before the early individualistic turn in antiquity; its propagandists were the men known as sages or philosophers.... who first gave the motif that true thought was only possible as independent thought, as thinking differently from the stupid masses....

right man to prepare the citizens of his country, who were facing disempowerment, for the benefits of the vita contemplativa. The transition to reflective existence was worth an error in reasoning: Cicero unhesitatingly created a lofty nimbus for the future Roman spectator by portraying Pythagoras making the many in the stadium into the few in study.

It is not sufficient, he emphasized, to colour (colorare) the mind with wisdom; it must be pickled (macerare) in it, as it were, soaked in it (inficere), and entirely transformed by it.

Pensar sobre a roupa, sobre roupas, significa pensar sobre memória, mas também sobre poder e posse.

If it's reality you want, I suggest you look out the window.

In irgendeiner Form leben wir alle nach unserem Tod weiter. In der Erinnerung anderer Menschen, von unseren Kindern. Und in dem, was wir geschaffen haben." "Schreibst du deshalb Bücher? Weil du keine Kinder hast?" "Ich will nicht ewig leben. Im Gegenteil. Ich möchte keine Spuren hinterlassen." "Doch", sagte Agnes.

That's the thing with reality, he said, you can't repeat it to order, you can't correct it. Perhaps we should read more books.

Mit den Wochen und Monaten wurde das Nachdenken weniger, und sie lernte, einfach nur da zu sein, in einem Zustand aufmerksamer Gleichgültigkeit.

Er erkundigte sich nach Agnes. Sie sei weggegangen, sagte ich, und er lächelte anzüglich. "Sie gehen alle irgendwann", sagte er, "mach dir nichts draus, die Welt ist voll schöner Frauen.

Und, dass es Glück war wird man erst aus der Distanz sehen.

Wenn er nämlich wahrhaft gelebt hat, kann das nur in fernen Landen gewesen sein.

Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.

What was the worst thing you've ever done? I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing...

It was incomprehensible to Ricky that anyone could find Milburn boring: if you watched it closely for seventy years, you saw the century at work.

When my childhood began coming back to me, I went off the rails for a bit. I became what you could charitably call "colorful." After a year or so of disgrace, I remembered that I was thirty-odd years old, no longer a child, that I had a calling of a kind, and I began to heal. Either childhood is a lot more painful the second time around, or it's just less bearable. None of us are as strong or as brave as the children we used to be.

Facing a wall when you write really aids your concentration.

Forgetting the injustices and seeming injustices which one suffered from one's parents during childhood and youth must be the major part of any maturing process.