Quotes About Reflection

Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?

What a day it is when we must envy the men in their graves.

Sound and sufficient reason falls, after all, to the share of but few men, and those few men exert their influence in silence.

It is natural to man to regard himself as the final cause of creation.

Where a man has a passion for meditating without the capacity of thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease.

As a man is, so is his God; therefore God was so often an object of mockery. [Ger., Wie einer ist, so ist sein Gott, Darum ward Gott so oft zu Spott.]

What man does not know, Or has not thought of, Wanders in the night Through the labyrinth of the mind.

Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself back into the unconscious, for his root lives there.

I never mingled with men, but I came home less of a man than I went out.

This oration will be read five hundred years hence with as much rapture as it was heard. It ought to be read at the end of every century, and indeed at the end of every year, forever and ever.

Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.

Old men who never cheated, never doubted, Communicated monthly, sit and stare At the new suburb stretched beyond the run-way Where a young man lands hatless from the air.

Fly-fishing for wild trout on quiet waters must be one of the toughest and craziest ways to catch fish ever invented by man, as well as among the most frustrating and humiliating.

Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.

A man really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning.

The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

So comes a reck'ning when the banquet's o'er, The dreadful reckn'ning, and men smile no more.

Som thingis that prouoke young men to wed in haste,Show after weddyng, that hast maketh waste.

When guests enter the room their entertainers rise to receive them; and in all meetings men should ascend into their higher selves, imparting to one another only the best they know and love.

Real question is not who was this man (Jesus), but who is this man?

To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray, — these are the things that make men happy.

The wisest men are wise to the full in death.

Give me a used Bible and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers.

...no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love.