Quotes About Reflection

The longer one lives, the more one realizes that nothing is a dish for every day.

There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.

We all need to have a creative outlet - a window, a space - so we don't lose track of ourselves.

A person doesn't die from this or that disease. He dies from his whole life.

Forgiveness Meditation. Settle into meditation. Recall someone whom you know you need to forgive. Just let the person's image or the sense of who they are arise in your mind. Feel the feelings. Observe whatever happens without entanglement. Let the feelings come and go. Don't try to forgive, just be present.

The human mind is a swirl of activity mostly centered around self preservation and self justification.

Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living.

We may not realize it, but every point during the passage of our lives is a point of no return -- except for what memory permits.

Even now, when I have time to consider what I've been and what I am, I doubt I comprehend my humanity, if I can claim so grand a word for my own morsel of life. I might as well be a meteor of a man, for all the difference I've made on earth.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand Lift the farm like a lid and see Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash.

Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.

All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible.

As I get considerably beyond the biblical allotment of three score years and ten, I feel with increasing intensity that I can express my gratitude for still being around on the oxygen-side of the earth's crust only by not standing pat on what I have hitherto known and loved. While oxygen lasts, there are still new things to love, especially if compassion is a form of love.

life every now and then becomes literature...as if life had been made and not happened.

Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.

We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.