Quotes About Reflection

It is last stage of all When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.

I am past thirty, and three parts iced over.

Round me too the night In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade. I see her veil draw soft across the day, I feel her slowly chilling breath invade The cheek grown thin, the brown hair sprent with grey; I feel her finger light Laid pausefully upon life's headlong train; -- The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew, The heart less bounding at emotion new, And hope, once crush'd, less quick to spring again.

What is the course of the life Of mortal men on the earth?-- Most men eddy about Here and there--eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and, then they die-- Perish; and no one asks Who or what they have been, More than he asks what waves In the moonlit solitudes mild Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd, Foam'd for a moment, and gone.

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday; I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.

Others abide our question. Thou art free.We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still,Out-topping knowledge.

Oh, born in days when wits were fresh and clear,And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;Before this strange disease of modern life,With its sick hurry, its divided aims,Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife.

Strew on her roses, roses,And never a spray of yew!In quiet she reposes;Ah, would that I did too!

And amongst us one,Who most has suffered, takes dejectedlyHis seat upon the intellectual throne.

Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the nightIn ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.

Hither and thither spinsThe windborne, mirroring soul;A thousand glimpses wins,And never sees a whole.

This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.

Be his [Sophocles']My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,From first youth tested up to extreme old age,Business could not make dull, nor passion wild:Who saw life steadily and saw it whole.

But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok'd souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will.

We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have liv'd light in the spring, To have lov'd, to have thought, to have done; To have advanc'd true friends, and beat down baffling foes; That we must feign a bliss Of doubtful future date, And while we dream on this Lose our present state, And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose? Empedocles on Etna: Act I, Scene II

Socrates has drunk his hemlock and is dead; but in his own breast does not every man carry about with him a possible Socrates, in that power of a disinterested play of consciousness upon his stock notions and habits, of which this wise and admirable man gave all through his lifetime the great example, and which was the secret of his incomparable influence?

Tis not the times, 'Tis not the Sophists vex him: There is some root of suffering in himself, Some secret and unfollow'd vein of woe, Which makes the times look black and sad to him. Empedocles on Etna: Act I, Scene I

In mystery our soul abides.

Is there no life, but these alone? Madman or slave, must man be one?

The past is always just a memory; the future, just a dream. The only real moment is the Now.

When I hear people fondly recalling their past, I hear Death sharpening his knives.

Losing him would, she realised, be unlike anything she had ever experienced before. A marriage is a conspiracy, a shared aspect toward the rest of the society, a code devised over a long history of negotiation and habit. That code would vanish. Her thoughts would be unobserved, her memories would be hers alone, without the heft that comes from sharing them with another. She would become insubstantial to herself.