Quotes About Reflection

National Review… stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.

The past is never dead, it is not even past.

The world is still, for she is old And many´s the bead of life she´s told. Her gossip there, the watching moon Views hill and stream and wave and dune

We always admire the other person more after we've tried to do his job.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

Many of our prayers were not answered, and for this we are now grateful

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

You have to hate how the world goes on.

Our conversation changed. It usually had a busy, must-say-everything edge to it, even during the long, lazy days of waiting for waves on Tavarua. But out in the lineup, once the swells started pumping, large pools of awe seemed to collect around us, hushing us, or reducing us to code and murmurs, as though we were in church. There was too much to say, too much emotion, and therefore nothing to say.

...the taste of the finely-worded truth rolled upon the tongue as its thought is revolved in the mind.

In these pages the novelist should be able to find a striking verse to head his chapter, the raconteur add to his bon mots, the man of the world enrich his stock of maxims, the divine obtain some deep thought drawn from the wells of ancient learning.

Indeed a good quotation hardly ever comes amiss. It is a pleasing break in the thread of a speech or writing, allowing the speaker or writer to retire for an instant while another and greater makes himself heard. And this calling-up of the deathless dead implies also a community of mind with them, which the reader will not grudge the author lest he should seem to deny it to himself.

We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about 'unthinkable things' because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

We must dare to think about unthinkable things because when things become unthinkable thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

Is it for the cultivated man, the man of broad and general views, to throw himself without reserve and with all his weight, into what, for aught he yet knows, may be only a cross-current and eddy, instead of the main stream of truth?

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible...

I really prefer books. No matter how bad a book is, it's unique, but people are all so ordinary. —I think we really like books that make us hate ourselves.

Reading Proust isn't just reading a book, it's an experience and you can't reject an experience.

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?