Quotes About Reflection

Who could look on these monuments without reflecting on the vanity of mortals in thus offering up testimonials of their respect for persons of whose very names posterity is ignorant?

Life is nice and round," he continued reflectively. "No beginning. No ending. I am now arrived at an age when you, my children, will carry on for me.

There's an easygoing nature that comes with a perspective of things that aren't as important as we make them sometimes.

such calls for caution

For all dead loves and all remembered things. I have travelled through many seas.

It was never reveille in this windy world.

Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again....Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes...

There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.

The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books.

El amor es un castigo. Somos castigados por no haber podido quedarnos solos.

I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.

I would have made a very crappy book heroine.

Older people are wise not only because they have lived longer. They're wise because they have lost more.

Creativity facilitates the work of mourning.

It is, in other words, in part through painful processes of loss and separation that we arrive at a sense of who we are. Such processes function as "boundary-creating" experiences that build singular and (more or less) self-sufficient psyches.

As we have discovered, although on one level psychoanalysis allows us to attain higher levels of perception and self-awareness, on another level it is an exercise in becoming reconciled to the idea that we can never entirely know ourselves.

On this view, our identities acquire depth and vitality not from any innate kernel of being, but from a gradual layering of stories. This in turn implies that the most current story that we tell about ourselves is merely the most recent draft of our life.

If I'm going to spend a lifetime writing my story, I want it to mean something.

Looking backward should never divert our path to one of hatred and bitterness, for those steps lead nowhere but to destruction. To live in hatred is to miss the point of living.

Let us cry for the spilt milk , by all means, if by doing so we learn how to avoid spilling any more. Let us cry for the spilt milk , and remember how, and where, and why, we spilt it. Much wisdom is learnt through tears, but none by forgetting our lessons.

And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. RAINER MARIA RILKE , Letters to a Young Poet

Life and death aren't as different from each other as I thought they were. This isn't like walking into a new country. This is like walking into a new room in the same house. This is like sharing a hallway and the same row of framed family pictures, but there's a glass wall between.

I was becoming convinced that I was going to be lonely for the rest of my life. It wasn't that I wasn't meeting men. I was. It was just that they all drove me crazy.

We know this much is true, and it's true for all souls: each of us will one day find the feast finished and, fattened or famished, step slowly backward into their own dark hall for that final night of sleep.