Quotes About Reflection

What qualifies as a good question? It's one that gets us thinking about something worth thinking about. So one way to identify a good question is what I call the smack-the-forehead test: when you read the question after time has passed, you smack your forehead and say, "If only I had thought of that before!

Researchers have found that merely asking people to assume their initial judgment is wrong, to seriously consider why that might be, and then make another judgment, produces a second estimate which, when combined with the first, improves accuracy almost as much as getting a second estimate from another person.

As Alexander would confess years later, sex and sleep more than anything else reminded him that he was mortal. One

While no one can change events that occurred in the past, everyone can change attitudes and beliefs about them.

That very day I resolved not to save all of my change until I turned forty. I resolved to have what I termed a little midlife crisis each day of my life in the hope of avoiding a larger one once I reached forty.

I love the hush of those deserted places, those old battlefields, always so breathtaking, as if we, as a species, have decided to fight only in beautiful places.

The most important thing to him is his drive, his purpose, his desire to give meaning to the experience of dying.

This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.

Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. 'Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it's written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.

Writing the forenames and family names of the victims down, with no other detail of age, or place, would fill twenty books. To begin to study the individual deaths would consume a hundred lifetimes. Which is why one of our deepest instincts can be simply to record names – individual lives, equally specific, equally valuable – never emphasizing one for fear of disrespecting another: listing them, as it were on a single stone wall – and steering away from blame or analysis.

If the opening chapters of Genesis portray God as a creative artist, then it only stands to reason that the people he made in his image will also be artists. Art is an imaginative activity, and in the act of creating, we reflect the mind of our Maker.

You must, although you know you won't like what you'll see.

Sometimes we come to gratitude too late. It's only after blessing has passed on that we realize what we had.

I don't want to spend this last half [of life] trying to recapture the first. I want to stretch and grow and do bold things ... and question what I've been taught and generally alarm people with my broadmindedness.

For a minister, that was pretty inconsiderate of him to go and get killed during Lent," she said.

I think you can tell when you meet someone whether they read novels. There's some hollowness if they don't.

This is a good place for thinking about your life, a few days in this place.

To lack a constant livelihood, yet to have a constant heart—only a scholar is capable of this.

Great thoughts, like great deeds, need No trumpet.

Night brings out stars as sorrow shows us truths.

Who never doubted never half believed Where doubt there truth is -- 'tis her shadow.

The ideal was the light; the real, the shadow.

I missed the sad things about growing old, when women no longer look at you, when wine makes you weep instead of laugh and makes your mouth sour with the taste of weakness, and every day is one day nearer death.

Experience was something it was difficult to avoid, though many people had managed to keep it to a minimum.