Quotes About Reflection

disputing nothing is the first step through the difficult door of happiness

A whole section of the family tree is pruned and primped and assessed as I politely sit there. Overall, I detect that the tree is fine: its leaves gently turning in the breeze of life. We have no scandal blight, no limb-wrenching storms of fate, no bad apples. I wonder what it is like when the Kennedys sit around for a disk check like this.

And so I was left with a mantra, a sort of haiku version of our relationship: I don't regret one day I spent with him, nor did I leave a moment too soon.

At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.

Every woman has a record of her body—a closet full of jeans and bras of various sizes, albums full of photographs revealing periods of weight gain and loss.

But now I was home. In my home, home home, once and for all. I had had various apartments before in quite a few cities over the course of my life, but this was the first one I owned, and it felt good. A roof over my head and a place to be private, to cry, to laugh, to gorge, to hope, to dream, to wallow, and to pray for things was a salve to my soul.

I could worry about his health but somehow not about my own. We throw ourselves away a little each day.

We throw ourselves away a little each day.

He was everything I wasn't. He was a lot of what I wanted to be.

If you want to know your past life, look at your present condition. If you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.

You don't have to be a philosopher; you just have to want to know who you are

death holds up an all-seeing mirror, 'the mirror of past actions', to our eyes, in which the consequences of all our negative and positive actions are clearly seen and there is a weighing of our past actions in the light of their consequences, the balance of which will determine the kind of existence or mental state we are being driven to enter.

When you hear pleasant or unpleasant words, understand them to be an empty resounding, like an echo. When you encounter severe misfonune and misery, understand it to be a temporary occurrence, a deluded experience. Recognize that the innate nature is never apart from you.

Again Master Padma said: Tsogyal, I have told this to everyone, but nobody listens. As soon as the Mara of Death catches hold of you, there is no chance for liberation. Those who do not practice the Dharma will regret this when approaching death. The years, months and days pass by without lingering even a second. This life runs out without pausing for even an hour or a minute, and then we die. The seasons continue, but your life finishes and doesn't wait.

You are not a Dharma practitioner if you don't mingle your mind with the Dharma. (p. 115)

The after-death state is very much like a dream state, and its dreams are the children of the mentality of the dreamer

Day and night, look into your mind. If your stream of mind contains any nonvirtue, renounce it from the core of your heart and pursue virtue.

When you hear pleasant or unpleasant words, understand them to be an empty resounding, like an echo. When you encounter severe misfortune and misery, understand it to be a temporary occurrence, a deluded experience. Recognize that the innate nature is never apart from you... (p. 29)

Solitude is the source of happiness

Through the study of books one seeks God; by meditation one finds him.

It's not like I can change any of it now. I can only use the experience to avoid such situations in the future.

Paladin: age is the price of living.

Happiness is never stopping to think if you are.

Odd how much it hurts when a friend moves away- and leaves behind only silence.