Quotes About Reflection

originality, foresight, and a wide range of knowledge, to name just a few introverted advantages. Introverts are often the employees

To be able to look back upon one's past life with satisfaction is to live twice.

To understand the ravings of a madman, one must have raved himself, but without having lost the awareness of one's madness,

Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

Meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

Look at the eyes now -- the eyes of an Old Believer. Part of his mind was away somewhere, dancing with itself.

Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it's a funny thing, but I'm an exception to that rule.'

Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

I have always derived great comfort from William Shakespeare. After a depressing visit to the mirror or an unkind word from a girlfriend or an incredulous stare in the street, I say to myself: 'Well. Shakespeare looked like shit.' It works wonders.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

we are, everyone of us, in arrears to death.

A noisy bed-frame is the last sound many a man has heard. I do not intend to join the august company of deceased fools.

I do not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolutes, but on a narrow, rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but [only] the certainty of meeting what remains, undisclosed.

In order to speak to the world what I have heard, I am not bound to step into the street. I may remain standing in the door of my ancestral house. …

The legendary anecdote goes one stop beyond: the single incident in question conveys the meaning of life.

Aller Widersinn, mit dem die Welt dich kränkt, tritt dich an, damit du den Sinn in ihm entdeckst, und aller Widerspruch, der in dir selbst dich peinigt, wartet auf deinen Spruch, ihn zu bannen.

The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.

Solitude is the place of purification.

You can rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way-- it will always be muck. Have I sinned or have I not sinned? In the time I am brooding over it, I could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

How easily, without noticing, a man finds himself parallel to the life he meant to have, then arrives, years later, to find the band gone, flowers dead, love past.