Quotes About Reflection

The day comes when love means something beyond a reflection of ourselves, when there is more behind than ahead and the house of mind is haunted in every chamber with old songs, old ghosts, old hopes.

Part of what we are is whom we've loved.

You go through it like a dark room, you sweat, you fear, the fear passes, you come out of it and utter nothing but meaningless words about what you saw or felt.

Perhaps a moment comes when must is to tired to fight and want breaks free to cry I am just once before the sun goes down.

I am aged with a sickness of the mind.

I can't think of it now. It costs too much.

Long into my career I harbored a secret sense that thinking and reading and writing, as much as I loved them, did not qualify as "real work.

We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.

I cannot imagine a spiritual pain deeper than dying with the thought that during my sojourn on earth, I had rarely, if ever, shown up as my true self. And I cannot imagine a spiritual comfort deeper than dying with the knowledge that I had spent my brief time on this planet doing the best I could to be present as myself to my family, my friends, my community, and my world.

We find common bonds in the shared details of the human journey, not in the divergent conclusions we draw from those details.

When I'm asked for the 'elevator speech' that sums up my work, I always respond, 'I always take the stairs, so I don't have an elevator speech. If you'd like to walk with me awhile, I'd love to talk.' I don't know of a life worth living or work worth doing that can be reduced to a sound bite." (40)

In the presence of a newly minted human being, I am reminded of what wholeness looks like. And I am sometimes moved to wonder, "Whatever became of me?

self-care is never a selfish act-it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires, we do so not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch.

no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment.

The writer Anne Lamott says, "You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."28

Teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see I have a chance to gain self knowledge and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject. In fact, knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self knowledge.

As a white, male American who has always been well-off—the kind of person for whom this nation has always worked best—the gift of full citizenship, unquestioned and unchallenged, came to me as an accident of birth. Today I realize the magnitude of that gift. But for years I was an unconscious and ungrateful recipient because attaining citizenship required no effort from me.

the personal can never be divorced from the professional. "We teach who we are" in times of darkness as well as light. In

Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling the who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live-but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.

Zen Judaism: For You, a Little Enlightenment

This was a step into darkness that I had been trying to avoid—the darkness of seeing myself more honestly than I really wanted to.

But for others, and I am one, the poet's words will be precise, piercing, and disquieting. They remind me of moments when it is clear—if I have eyes to see—that the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me. In those moments I sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden like the river beneath the ice. And in the spirit of the poet, I wonder: What am I meant to do? Who am I meant to be?

Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about—or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for "voice." Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live—but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.