Quotes About Reflection

The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old, so I guess I'll concentrate on that. Maybe I'll live so long that I'll forget her—maybe I'll die trying.

I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don't think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.

That man is intellectually of the mass who, in face of any problem, is satisfied with thinking the first thing he finds in his head. On the contrary, the excellent man is he who contemns what he finds in his mind without previous effort, and only accepts as worthy of him what is still far above him and what requires a further effort in order to be reached.

Pensar es un movimento natatorio para salvarse de la perdición en el caos

faithfully kept a Confucian-style diary of daily self-criticism.

Calling transforms life so that even the commonplace and menial are invested with the splendour of the ordinary.

All good thinking is a matter of asking and answering three elementary questions. What is being said? Is it true? What of it?

We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.

The author explores the result of endless choice. It is not only overload, but a profound loss of unity, solidity, and coherence in life.

What Socrates called the "unexamined life" that is "not worth living" now seems to be the life more people have slipped into than ever before.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. WILLIAM HAZLITT

The story is told of Socrates walking through the market in Athens, with its groaning abundance of options, and saying to himself, "Who would have thought that there could be so many things that I can do without?"4

use questions to raise questions

In a world congenial to skepticism, skeptics love to play the skeptic's card nonchalantly as if it were the royal flush that trumped all other cards and could not be countered. For many, it has become the skeptics' way of hanging out a "Do Not Disturb" sign. Simply raise a skeptical objection and retire from all argument. But of course, the simplest response is to turn such skepticism back on itself.

Thinking Christians think in believing and they believe in thinking.

Pascal and his brilliant exposition in Pensées. "I have often said," Pascal wrote, "that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his own room."46

Not only do Christians believe, they are those who "think in believing and believe in thinking," as Augustine expressed it. The world of Christian faith is not a fairy-tale, make-believe world, question-free and problem-proof, but a world where doubt is never far from faith's shoulder.

Biography can overwhelm philosophy in the best of us.

For all of us, the time is short and the span of life is brief On top of that, our real human problem, the Stoic philosopher Seneca said in a direct rebuke to the modern illusion, is not just that life is short but that we waste so much of it-so that life ceases for us "just when we are getting ready for it."35 But

For any follower of Jesus Christ who follows this path on the quest for meaning, the statement is true: A Christian thinks in believing and believes in thinking.

Christians," as that crusty old philosopher Bertrand Russell used to quip, "would sooner die than think—in fact they do.

There is no problem with the wider culture that you cannot see in the spades in the Christian Church. The rot is in us, and not simple out there. And Christians are making a great mistake by turning everything into culture wars. It's a much deeper crisis.

Culturally, one of the best arguments we can make is, wait and see.

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.