Quotes About Reflection

he certainly never regretted his love for Susan. What he did regret was that he had been too young, too ignorant, too absolutist, too confident of what he imagined love's nature and workings to be.

But time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ how time first grounds us and then confounds us.

Tai ir yra gyvenimas, ar ne? Šiek tiek pasiekim? ir šiek tiek nusivylim?.

Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present.

Pase lo que pase –escribió Flaubert cuando estalló la guerra franco-prusiana–, seguiremos siendo unos estúpidos.» ¿Simple pesimismo jactancioso? ¿O se trata de la necesaria aceleración de las expectativas, cuando aún no se puede pensar, actuar o escribir adecuadamente?

Gustave's last years are arid and solitary. He

Vivimos en el tiempo —nos contiene y nos moldea—, pero nunca he creído comprenderlo muy bien.

How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so?

De haber vivido, ¿habría disfrutado de la vida, como la mayoría hacemos o intentamos hacer? Quizá; o tal vez habría albergado culpa y remordimiento por no haber sabido acoplar sus actos con sus argumentos.

Es menos el recuerdo de un suceso que el recuerdo de una fotografía del suceso. Y hoy día, como hemos perdido altura, precisión, foco, ya no confiamos tanto en la fotografía como en otra época. Las viejas instantáneas de tiempos más felices parecen haberse vuelto menos primarias, menos fotografías de la vida misma y más fotografías de fotografías. O, dicho de otro modo, tu recuerdo de tu vida —tu vida anterior

Goethe, than whom few of us can hope to live a fuller or more interesting life, stated on his deathbed – he was eighty-two at the time – that he had only ever felt happiness in his life for one quarter of an hour.

And so, wisely no doubt, I left philosophy to my brother, and returned to literature, which did, and still does, tell us best what the world consists of. It can also tell us how best to live in that world, thought it does so most effectively when appearing not to do so.

A veces pienso que el sentido de la vida es menoscabarnos para que nos reconciliemos con su pérdida final, demostrando, por mucho tiempo que tarde, que la vida no es tan buena como la pintan.

How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted?

Y lo mismo ocurre con nuestra vida: tan clara, tan segura, hasta que por una razón u otra —el globo se mueve, la nube se dispersa, el sol cambia de ángulo— la imagen se pierde para siempre, se torna accesible sólo al recuerdo, se convierte en anécdota.

Sometimes the past may be a greased pig; sometimes a bear in its den; and sometimes merely the flash of a parrot, two mocking eyes that spark at you from the forest.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

Things, once gone, can't be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can't be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can't be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we may claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn't forget, because we have been changed for ever.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old

Nors kartais pirmoji meil? sugildo šird?, ir kiekvienas, bandantis j? v?l atverti, neranda nieko, tik sen? rand?.

The bitch, I thought. If there was one woman in the entire world a man could fall in love with and still think life worth refusing, it was Veronica.

How could I possibly be a better person without her than with her? Later, I thought: but he is just echoing Nietzsche's line about what doesn't kill us making us stronger. And as it happens, I have long considered this epigram particularly specious. There are many things that fail to kill us but weaken us for ever. Look around at those emotionally damaged by mere ordinary life.

Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel: as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day's hiking.