Quotes About Reflection

Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything.

They lived autobiographies

They, whether steel kings or Bonapartes, cannot, after a certain age, endure solitude. For it is the solitude, even though strictly relative in the majority of cases, that kills them, or sends them on the road to Waterloo.

The last thing we learn about ourselves is our effect.

It terrifies me, the fragility of these moments in our lives.

Are our lives just the aggregate of the lies we've told? ('Lives' - the 'v' is silent.)

Establish by word and example that this is a time to step back and take stock, a time to question the "usual," and a time to come up with new and creative solutions to the organization's difficulties. Explain how business as usual chokes off creativity and explain why the present is the best possible time to generate and test new ideas. Model this new manner yourself by taking time to step back and question how your own job is done.

Provide opportunities for others to step back and take stock, both organizationally and individually: schedule offsites, process reviews, surveys, and open conversations; offer people the chance to review their careers and refocus their efforts in areas of growing interest to them.

And although it may be hard to think about larger issues while you are in the immediate turmoil of a transition, you must finally deal with them if you are to understand not only what is happening, but why, when, and how it is happening. In other words, I am not telling you to stop bailing - just to cast an eye over the map and think about where your little boat is heading.

Third Law of Organizational Development: in any significant transition, the thing that the organization needs to let go of is the very thing that got it this far. Discovering that law is painful, especially when you feel that you owe everything to the people, the culture, the style of management, or the strategy that "got you this far.

Wise leaders, understanding that example is the most powerful tool they can employ, start with themselves: "What part of my identity—of the way I come across, and even the way I experience myself—do I need to let go of if we are going to enter the Path of Renewal?

the First Law of Organizational Development is evident: those who were most at home with the necessary activities and arrangements of one phase are the ones who are the most likely to experience the subsequent phase as a severe personal setback. They will talk about it as a "strategic mistake," as "dumb," "unnecessary," and "too expensive.

Don't just talk about the endings—create actions or activities that dramatize them.

Never denigrate the past. Many managers, in their enthusiasm for a future that is going to be better than the past, ridicule or demean the old way of doing things. In doing so they consolidate the resistance against the transition because people identify with the way things used to be and thus feel that their self-worth is at stake whenever the past is attacked.

Endings occur more easily if people can take a bit of the past with them. You are trying to disengage people from it, not stamp it out like an infection. And in particular, you don't want to make people feel blamed for having been part of it.

Beginnings establish once and for all that an ending was real.

A corollary to this idea is that the past, which people are likely to idealize during an ending

Always consider the possibility that you may be wrong. Especially when you are absolutely certain you are right.

The sun sat, in immense fieriness, just above the horizon, the sea, glittering in great swatches of phosphorescent white, waiting to receive it. Then the blazing ball dived and was gone, swallowed in one big gulp by the hungry waters. Amazing how fast, once it got near it, the sun in these latitudes hastened into the sea.

A green world, a scene of green, deep / with light blues, the greens made deep / by those blues. One thinks how / in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen / (through a window, maybe) far behind the serene / sitter's face, the serene pose, as though/in some impossible mirror, face to back, / human serenity gazed at a green world / which gazed at this face.

I think having children makes one think in spiritual terms. I may not have a soul, but I'm certain Gloria has one. I only have to look into her eyes, and I see it moving about.

body bowed forward as though she were

escape our own mind.

Higher self now!" and "Spiritual essence now!