Quotes About Reflection

Whosoever is delighted in solitude," goes the old saying that Francis Bacon repeated, "is either a wild beast or a god.

it is never a waste to write for intrinsic reasons. First of all, writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression. It allows one to record events and experiences so that they can be easily recalled, and relived in the future. It is a way to analyze and understand experiences, a self-communication that brings order to them.

One can survive solitude, but only if one finds ways of ordering attention that will prevent entropy from destructuring the mind.

The roots of the discontent are internal, and each person must untangle them personally, with his or her own power.

As Francis Bacon remarked, quoting from a speech by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, "The good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

el gran emperador Marco Aurelio escribió: «Si te sientes dolido por las cosas externas, no son éstas las que te molestan, sino tu propio juicio acerca de ellas. Y está en tu poder el cambiar este juicio ahora mismo».

In normal life, we keep interrupting what we do with doubts and questions. "Why am I doing this? Should I perhaps be doing something else?" Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions, and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out. But in flow there is no need to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic.

Observing, recording, and preserving the memory of both the large and small events of life is one of the oldest and most satisfying ways to bring order to consciousness.

means that we must constantly reevaluate what we do, lest habits and past wisdom blind us to new possibilities.

Pero si una persona se toma unos momentos para reflexionar, el desencanto vuelve: tras cada éxito se ve con mayor claridad que el dinero, el poder, la posición social y las posesiones, por sí mismas, no añaden ni un ápice a la calidad de vida.

Many people give up on learning after they leave school because thirteen or twenty years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories.

Having a record of the past can make a great contribution to the quality of life. It frees us from the tyranny of the present, and makes it possible for consciousness to revisit former times.

But even when there is nothing else pressing occupying their minds, most people fall far below the peak capacity for processing information. In the roughly one-third of the day that is free of obligations, in their precious "leisure" time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible.

you don't conquer anything except things in yourself…. The act of writing justifies poetry.

Even the approach of death itself can serve to create harmony in consciousness, rather than despair.

Chance and necessity are sole rulers of beings who are incapable of reflection.

You can drive a car all your life without knowing how the engine works, because the goal of driving is to get from one place to the next, regardless how it's done. But to live without understanding how we think, why we feel the way we feel, what directs our actions is to miss what is most important in life, which is the experience itself.

Albert Einstein once wrote that art and science are two of the greatest forms of escape from reality that humans have devised.

It sounds somewhat ridiculous to say that one of the problems we face at this point in history is that we haven't learned how to spend free time in a sensible way.

After an insight occurs, one must check it out to see if the connections genuinely make sense. The painter steps back from the canvas to see whether the composition works, the poet rereads the verse with a more critical eye, the scientist sits down to do the calculations or run the experiments. Most lovely insights never go any farther, because under the cold light of reason fatal flaws appear. But if everything checks out, the slow and often routine work of elaboration begins

One of the values in walking to work is mental meandering. Or if driving, not to have the car radio on. Now I don't think of myself as necessarily especially creative, but this creativity has to be a profoundly wasteful process. And that mental meandering, mind wandering and so on, is an essential process.

If one reads the biographies of physicists like Bohr, Heisenberg, Chandrashekhar, and Bethe, one gets the impression that without hikes in the mountains and the vision of night skies their science would not have amounted to much.

It is how we choose what we do, and how we approach it, that will determine whether the sum of our days adds up to a formless blur, or to something resembling a work of art.

I was fired at the pinnacle of my career, on my 39th birthday. And in the year that followed, I learned that there are many psychological phases of being 'let go.'