Quotes About Reflection

Now I see it's in the spaces where nothing is happening that one has to make a life.

You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, "We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is...frozen.

And just as it is common to hear how, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love—our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything—so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it. Suddenly, everything I saw or read, in this girlish city of temples, seemed to take me back to the theme of the lady and the monk.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life," Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, "is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.

What if?" points in both directions.

So much of our lives takes place in our heads - in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation - that sometimes I feel that I can change my life by changing the way I look at it.

Even as we fret about the changes our progress wreaks in the air and on the airwaves, in forests and on streets, we hardly worry about the change it is working in ourselves, the new kind of soul that is being born out of a new kind of life. Yet this could be the most dangerous development of all, and the least examined. " -Pico Iyer

And it's only by going nowhere- by sitting still or letting my mind relax- that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

You don't get over the shadows inside you simply by walking away from them.

I'd turned to writing because it offered few escape routes or hiding places; it's harder to lie to yourself on the page than in the world.

Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.

It wasn't the country, the girl, the teacher who let us down; it was our judgment, and whatever led us to expect too much of the country, the girl or the teacher in the first place. That was why it became harder and harder to condemn anyone: wouldn't God himself, faced with a wounded murderer, feel somewhat at a loss?

Going nowhere was the grand adventure that made sense of everywhere else.

As it is common to hear now, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love - our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything - so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it.

You learned about autumn early.

Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying.

And the question at the heart of every one was as simple as it was unanswerable: how make peace and passion rhyme?

Hold this moment forever, I tell myself; it may never come again.

This road No one on it As autumn ends —BASHO, near Kyoto, weeks before his death

Everywhere, in some lights, is a Lonely Place, just as everyone, at moments, is a solitary. Everyone sometimes dances madly when alone, or thumbs through secrets in a drawer. Everyone, at some times, is a continent of one.

This road No one on it As autumn ends

La luna era ormai alta alta nel cielo, s'era rimpicciolita e pareva non volesse più aver che fare col mondo, tutta assorta nella contemplazione di quello che ci stava al di là. Al mondo, pareva che ormai mostrasse solo il sedere; e, da quel sederino d'argento, pioveva giù una luce grandiosa, che invadeva tutto.

Ecco quindi la mia conclusione: la rassegnazione non ha nulla da invidiare all'eroismo.

Yo soy una fuerza del pasado