Quotes About Reflection

Yet the explanation was simple. These memories had died of inanition. You've got the pay visits to your memories from time to time. You've got to feed them, take them out and air them, show them around, tell them to other people or to yourself. If you don't, they waste away.

No, I stayed home. And yet, in one way or another -- by way of telephone conversations, letters, photographs, or simply memories -- all of these worlds were part of my day today.

Decidedly, the more I think about these things, the more at sea I feel.

People can choose to treasure those parts of their heritage that they see as favorable and wish to keep, jettisoning what unpleasant truths they would prefer to forget.

Law is not theater. Before we write laws reflecting gaudy and dramatic feelings, we must be very sure we understand the difference.

It was funny in a way, but only in the unhumorous way anything recent was funny. In another 80 years, maybe she would find it hilarious.

The grateful heart that springs forth in joy is not acquired in a moment; it is the fruit of a thousand choices.

Frequently, I will read one or two selections from a devotional book as a means of tuning my heart before I open the Scripture. These books, written by human authors, should never take the place of the Word of God itself, but they can help us focus on spiritual matters and clear out any clutter that may be distracting to us.

Please work out that surrender in my life—every day, in every matter, until I bow before You in eternity. Amen.

The older we get, the bigger the catalog of failures Satan can throw in our faces. You may think, 'I don't have anything to offer.' But you can teach out of your failures as well as your successes (p. 223).

Our outer world reflects our inner commitments. If we want to know what we are really committed to, all we have to do is look at our lives. We are, whether we are aware of it or not, always creating exactly what we are most committed to.

Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves.

The capacity to dream beyond the facts of existence into their significance enables us to remember a true past, one that simultaneously reflects and illuminates experience.

Only after many years will I recognize that I, too, have survived a loss, and not necessarily intact. The depression and multiple sclerosis awaiting me will suggest that changes in the structural level have already occurred by the time I learn to forgive Daddy for abandoning me without even saying good-bye.

My bald pate bobs and blunders, I bang it when I fall; My cock's gone soft and clammy And I can't hear when they call.

Feelings have their own kind of wisdom.

My candle burns at both ends;   It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—   It gives a lovely light!

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Please don't be depressed: nothing is sad about you except your sadness...

The only way Christ's Life can be shown forth is by first "putting off" our ungodly thoughts and emotions and then "putting on" the Mind of Christ.

But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,' I said. 'He was the great love of her life, you know.' Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly. 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.

I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection, and take furtive peeps into their looking-glasses, it is hardly ever, as is generally supposed, from vanity, but much more often from a feeling that all is not quite as it should be

There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment—click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.

Many of us in industrialized countries often act as if we have nothing to learn from developing nations, yet many of these traditional cultures do something extraordinarily right in the way they care for new mothers.