Quotes About Reflection

How, exactly, do we resolve dilemmas that tempt us to choose either this or that and instead hold the tension long enough to let a "third thing" emerge?

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.

What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity—the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.

From the beginning, our lives lay down clues to selfhood and vocation, though the clues may be hard to decode. But trying to interpret them is profoundly worthwhile—especially when we are in our twenties or thirties or forties, feeling profoundly lost, having wandered, or been dragged, far away from our birthright gifts.

My countrymen,…think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste, to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.20

In a prose passage on a life in art—without explanation or elaboration, as if the idea had just popped into his head and he had to capture it before it fled—Thoreau drops this simple couplet: My life has been the poem I would have writ But I could not both live and utter it.

if we who are privileged find ourselves confined, it is only because we have conspired in our own imprisonment.

Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situation—projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves—and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.

A good education teaches us to hold contradictions reflectively rather than reactively, a habit of the heart that lies behind all social, cultural, and scientific breakthroughs.

There is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does -- maybe more.

Way has never opened in front of me…but a lot of way has closed behind me, and that has had the same guiding effect.

They should be encouraged to bring all of who they are and what they know into each class. By welcoming the whole student into our classes, unfamiliar aspects of who they are and what they care about suddenly come into view. What are the heartfelt questions they struggle with? Are they too scared to acknowledge the hopes and aspirations they harbor for their lives and for this world?

Experience alone opens a door, but intellectual framing and reflection are required if meaning is to be made of the experience.

Had I known but yesterday what I know today, I'd have taken out your two grey eyes and put in eyes of clay. And had I known but yesterday you'd be no more my own, I'd have taken out your heart of flesh and put in one of stone.

the distentions we make indicates our future so make, good choices

C'est étrange, se disait-il, que l'on aime les gens, qu'ils disparaissent, et que l'on continue à les aimer, mais dans sa tête, pour soi, sans le leur dire. Comme si le fait de ne plus être en contact n'enlevait rien à leur présence.

Le livre est un morceau de silence dans les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit se tait. Celui qui lit ne rompt pas le silence.

Un livre est un peu de silence entre les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit calme. Celui qui le lit ne rompt pas le silence.

Por vezes é suficiente a bruma ou a montanha. Por vezes uma árvore que se inclina sob as rajadas do vento é suficiente. Por vezes a noite é suficiente, e não o sonho que torna presente à alma aquilo que lhe falta ou que perdeu.

Il y a un âge où on ne rencontre plus la vie mais le temps. On cesse de voir la vie vivre. On voit le temps qui est en train de dévorer la vie toute crue. Alors le cœur se serre. On se tient à des morceaux de bois pour voir encore un peu le spectacle qui saigne d'un bout à l'autre du monde et pour ne pas y tomber.

Ces marques de vieillesse le rapprochaient d'elle ou de son état. Son cœur battait à rompre par la joie qu'il éprouvait et ses mains tremblaient.

Caminar no consuela. Caminar hace pensar. Cada paso argumenta.

Lire c'est errer. La lecture est l'errance.

J'ai le regret de votre mère. Chacun des souvenirs que j'ai gardés de mon épouse est un morceau de joie que je ne retrouverai jamais.