Quotes About Reflection

Saying is one thing, doing another. We must consider the sermon and the preacher distinctly and apart.

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.

How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.

A wise man never loses anything if he have himself.

It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.

He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

I quote others only to better express myself.

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.

I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.

We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep. Nay, and when I walk alone in a beautiful Orchard, if my Thoughts are some part of the Time taken up with strange Occurrences, I some part of the Time call them back again to my Walk, or to the Orchard, to the Sweetness of the Solitude, and to my self.

I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?

Their [the Skeptics'] way of speaking is: "I settle nothing…. I do not understand it…. Nothing seems true that may not seem false." Their sacramental word is E?___, which is to say, I suspend my judgment.

Everyone recognizes me in my book, and my book in me.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

This notion [skepticism] is more clearly understood by asking "What do I know?"

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.