Quotes About Reflection

At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.

Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.

A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.

Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.

I think somebody ought to do a survey as to how many great, important men have quit to spend time with their families who spent any more time with their family. Probably less.

A more conscious life is one in which a man is conscious not only of what he sees, but of the prejudices with which he sees it.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.

No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society.

Men educated in [the critical habit of thought]are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain.

No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.

When a wise man gives thee better counsel, give me mine again.

A man really and practically looking onwards to an immortal life, on whatever grounds, exhibits to us the human soul in an enobled attitude.

Huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day and were trouble to my dreams.

Those unacquainted with the world take pleasure in intimacy with great men; those who are wiser fear the consequences.

In sum, thought and reflection have been rendered thoroughly pointless by the circumstances in which modern men and women live and act.

Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.

Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.

So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.

The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.

Alas the Master; so he sinks in death. But whoso knows the mystery of man Sees life and death as curves of the same plan

Why has not Man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly. Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n, T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n.

I am an old man and I have seen things get revoked. Things which looked very irrevocable.