Quotes About Reflection

of the ocean and the sound of the water lapping

A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world.

As Plato: We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.

It's a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it's happened on your watch.

Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.

Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.

And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)

When you didn't force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn't catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn't impale them and label them, like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then... what?

For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread. The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.... Shall we think of the day as a chance to come nearer to our Host, and to find out something of Him who has fed us so long?

I once laughed at the vanity of women of thirty or forty who whitened their ruddy old skin with lead, but now I know such salves are not disguises for old crones who wish to catch a young husband. Instead they are only a mask we wear so that we can, for a little while, still recognize ourselves.

Even if God forgives you, you do not forgive yourself. You live in your sorrow like a room of mirrors that reflects on and on to eternity.

Zsofía Forgách had died in the spring, and since then I had noticed a change in him, a subtle shift from merriment to contemplation, from engaging in the games the men played to an almost womanish need to stand back and watch with an appraising eye, as if his companions were people he had never seen before and did not know how to place

Be kind to your shadow.

The older I get, the less busy I like to be.

I like to stay busy. I have a lot of things on my mind.

In our business, it's hard to look at anything in retrospect and look at your accomplishments because you're so busy thinking about the next week. What we do is 52 weeks a year.

When I am on my own, I get nervous and have butterflies.

I wasn't a social butterfly at all.

I like to read books and be alone; I'm not social butterfly person.

I am Nigel 'Benjamin Button' Benn, it's not about age.

I don't want to tell you what to buy. I just want to help you think about why you're buying it.

Instead of buying six things, buy one thing that you really like. Don't keep buying just for the sake of it.

People are buying my life when they're buying those records. I hate to sound bigheaded or something, but that's the reality of it. Suddenly, everything you've been doing means something.

Haven't read a book for years - keep buying them and never getting round to reading them - I never seem to have the time.