Quotes About Reflection

En jij? Jij bent de vreemde hier, je blijft hier komen omdat je niet weet waar je anders naartoe moet, dát is de realiteit, verdorie, eindelijk heb je het tegen jezelf gezegd.

Could there ever be a more wonderful story than your own?

Be humble, for the worst thing in the world is of the same stuff as you; be confident, for the stars are of the same stuff as you.

A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one's soul. How ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print, and dead men's sentiments!

I have held the hands of countless dying people from all sorts of backgrounds, and I do not think I have met a single person who didn't share the exact same aspirations at the end of life: to make amends for mistakes, to be close to loved ones, to tell one's story to someone who will listen, and to die free of pain.

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead -- and that one was myself.

My friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow?

In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.

media aren't just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

The mind of the experienced book reader is a calm mind, not a buzzing one. When it comes to the firing of our neurons, it's a mistake to assume that more is better.

Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.

We should imitate bees," Seneca wrote, "and we should keep in separate compartments whatever we have collected from our diverse reading, for things conserved separately keep better. Then, diligently applying all the resources of our native talent, we should mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and then turn them into a single sweet substance, in such a way that, even if it is apparent where it originated, it appears quite different from what it was in its original state.

Sam Anderson, "In Defense of Distraction," New York, May 25, 2009.

Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think," said the novelist David Foster Wallace in a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

gained. We shouldn't allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we've numbed an essential part of our self.

We are how we read.

Drawings are not just end products: they are part of the thought process

true enlightenment comes only through contemplation and introspection.

There needs to be time for efficient data collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine and time to sit idly in the garden.

It's not only deep thinking that requires a calm, attentive mind. It's also empathy and compassion.

Americans used to extol good-hearted Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give to the poor, and now we've stepped into the shoes of the Sheriff of Nottingham. When as a society we shrug at 30 million children living in low-income families in America, slashing their benefits while urging them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we need to look in the mirror and have a good talk with ourselves.

What I missed was what I missed every year when the season ended and abruptly the radio was quiet. I missed them.

When you work all the time, the other aspects of your identity recede until they seem to have disappeared.