Quotes About Reflection

Ils marchèrent toute la journée sur leurs ombres grandissantes.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

A book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.

On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favorite book.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

The true paradises are paradises we have lost.

We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us or spare us.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.

One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment..

There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.