Quotes About Reflection

The only true paradise is paradise lost

I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person;

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

the comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation

People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.

We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.

For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.

When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.

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 favourite book.

Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue. May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, which is coming now for me, when the woods are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I am doing, by looking up to the sky.

In reality, every reader when he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader's recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

Le risoluzioni definitive si prendono sempre e soltanto per uno stato d'animo che non è destinato a durare.

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus.

the remembrence of things past is not nessecarly the remeberance of things as they were