Quotes About Reflection

For how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.

Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.

You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.

In human affairs of danger and delicacy successful conclusion is sharply limited by hurry. So often men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear. Very few people learn this.

It was a morning like other mornings and yet perfect among mornings.

Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. While there remains even a plaintive memory, a person cannot be cut off, dead. And he thought, "It's a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man's life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness.

Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

What pillow can one have like a good conscience?

Sometimes in the summer evenings they walked up the hill to watch the afterglow clinging to the tops of the western mountains and to feel the breeze drawn into the valley by the rising day-heated air. Usually they stood silently for a while and breathed in peacefulness. Since both were shy they never talked about themselves. Neither knew about the other at all.

We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for thy can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.

As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment.

And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity.

He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. -Hazel, Cannery Row

Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know.

But you can't start over, Only a baby can start over. You and me, Why, we're all that's been.

I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in and along the river I know and do not love very much. For I have discovered that there are other rivers.

The remarkable thing," said Doc, "isn't that they put their tails up in the air—the really incredibly remarkable thing is that we find it remarkable. We can only use ourselves as yardsticks. If we did something as inexplicable and strange we'd probably be praying—so maybe they're praying.

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless.

S-l-o-w-ness--it gave meaning to everything. It made everything royal.

I have seen too many men go down, and I never permit myself to forget that one day, through accident or under the charge of a younger, stronger knight, I too will go down.

Why do men like me want sons? he wondered. It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance at life; like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone.