Quotes About Reflection

Dreams, my mother always told me, represend part of our unconsciousness--the place where we store the true parts of our soul, away from the rest of the world. From Breena quoting her mother in Bitter Frost

the real world was only a dream, only an echo, and in silent moments throughtout the day it would hit me: i am not at home here.

Sometimes at night I think that my husband is with me again, coming gently through the mists, and we are tranquil together. Then the morning comes, the wavering grey turns to gold, there is stirring within me as the sleepers awake, and he softly departs.

Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüt mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je öfter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschäftigt: der gestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir.

The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded in the egoism I was supposed to transcend. Now I was beginning to understand that a silence that is not clamorous with vexation and worried self-regard can become part of the texture of your mind, can seep into you, moment by moment, and gradually change you.

Some people simply bury their heads in the sand and refuse to think about the sorrow of the world, but this is an unwise course, because, if we are entirely unprepared, the tragedy of life can be devastating.

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.

a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.

Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives – they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.

We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.

novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If

And before you embark on an argument or a debate, ask yourself honestly if you are ready to change your mind.

The Sufis, the Sunni mystics with whom the Ismailis felt great affinity, had an axiom: "He who knows himself, knows his Lord.

Remember that we can become twinned with an enemy and come to resemble him. Our hatred may become an alter ego, a part of our identity.

eminent monotheists in all three faiths—that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.

A disorderly spirituality that makes the practitioner dreamy, eccentric, or uncontrolled is a very bad sign indeed. In

The personal God reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than human.

instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.

Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue.

our version of the same event is also likely to be a reflection upon our own situation and suffering rather than a dispassionate and wholly factual account. We

the attempt to become a compassionate human being is a lifelong project.

Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair.

if they did not interrogate their most fundamental beliefs, they would live superficial, expedient lives, because "the unexamined life is not worth living."7

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) distinguished between a problem, "something met which bars my passage" and "is before me in its entirety," and a mystery, "something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is not before me in its entirety."69