Quotes About Reflection

Being human means asking the questions of one's own being and living under the impact of the answers given to this question. And, conversely, being human means receiving answers to the questions of one's own being and asking questions under the impact of the answers.

Spiritual self-affirmation occurs in every moment in which man lives creatively in the various spheres of meaning.

Astonishment is the root of philosophy.

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements - as well as one's deepest failures - is a definite symptom of maturity.

I am sailing in uncharted water and my old life is a distant shore, still visible through the haze of retrospection but receding to a grey line on the horizon.

We have got ethical in so many places I begin to wish I had not given up geography at school.

Recounting of a life story, a mind thinking aloud leads one inevitably to the consideration of problems which are no longer psychological but spiritual.

Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either.

Wayne? When I'm famous I'm not gonna speak to anybody—not even the band.' It was a strange thing to say—it stuck in my head." Only then did he reflect how David was always "friendly. But I suppose he was never really giving much away.

Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

Sometimes I think and other times I am.

Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

Sometime I think; and sometime I am.

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly

Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.

My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

We see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.

Our judgements judge us; and nothing reveals us [or] exposes our weaknesses more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

She is entirely in her closed eyes, and quite alone with her soul, in the bosom of the most intimate attention... She feels in herself that she is becoming some event.

What a pity to see a mind as great as Napoleon's devoted to trivial things such as empires, historic events, the thundering of cannons and of men; he believed in glory, in posterity, in Caesar; nations in turmoil and other trifles absorbed all his attention ... How could he fail to see that what really mattered was something else entirely?

I think of the presence and of the habits of mortals in this so fluid stream, and reflect that I was among them, striving to see all things just as I see them at this very moment. I then placed Wisdom in the eternal station which now is ours. But from here all is unrecognizable. Truth is before us, and we no longer understand anything at all.

You have made yourself an island of time, you are a time that has become detached from that vast Time in which your indefinite duration has the subsistence and eternity of a smoke-ring.