Quotes About Reflection

The scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please — you can never have both.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

It is time to be old,To take in sail.

I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching.

I wiped away the weeds and foam,I fetched my sea-born treasures home;But the poor, unsightly, noisome thingsHad left their beauty on the shore,With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.

Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home;Thou art not my friend and I'm not thine.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.

To think is to act.

God enters by a private door into each individual.

Nor knowest thou what argumentThy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.All are needed by each one;Nothing is fair or good alone.

We may like well to know what is Plato's and what is Montesquieu's or Goethe's part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

The mind will quote whether the tongue does or not.

All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation.

Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls and to-tomorrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.