Quotes About Reflection

but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude….

There was loneliness, too, as the sun set, but only rarely now did doubts return. Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.

As I write these words, half a year has passed since I returned from Nepal, and on any given day during those six months, no more than two or three hours have gone by in which Everest hasn't monopolized my thoughts. Not even in sleep is there respite: imagery from the climb and its aftermath continues to permeate my dreams.

Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.

Most of us were simply wrapped too tightly in the grip of summit fever to engage in thoughtful reflection about the death of someone in our midst.

And then I found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on, the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth.

Invece di raccogliere dei ricordi personali, Viesturs si sedette vicino a Fischer, lungo la discesa, trascorrendo qualche minuto da solo con lui. Ehi, Scott, come te la passi? chiese tristemente Ed al suo amico. Che cosa ti è successo, amico?

Crusty old alpinists who've survived a lifetime of close scrapes like to counsel young protégés that staying alive hinges on listening carefully to one's "inner voice.

But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours–because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down– it's not apparent from the photograph. He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes. Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.

Joseph wasn't by nature reflective or deliberative. He conducted his life impulsively, acting according to instinct and emotion. The Lord, it seemed to him, must surely have intended man to know the love of more than one wife or He wouldn't have made the prospect so enticing.

Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.

escala si quieres, pero recuerda que el coraje y la fuerza no son nada sin la prudencia, y que un descuido momentáneo puede destruir la felicidad de toda una vida. No hagas nada con precipitación; vigila cada paso que des, y, desde el principio, piensa en cuál puede ser el final.

brooding on a Colorado barstool, picking unhappily at my existential scabs

traumatized people find themselves reenacting some aspect of the trauma scene in disguised form, without realizing what they are doing….There

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. (…) I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale.

VaroluÅŸun ham nabz?ndan koptuÄŸunu ac? içinde hissettiÄŸi yerden art?k uzakt?.

It's not that I normally avoid thinking about my Mom. I think about her every day, of course, and feel how much I miss her. But I always make sure not to wade in above my chest.

The whole city stopped - And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again.

I didn't know what to do, there was a feeling of time running out and a loss of momentum, of opportunities wasted.

History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. —JAMES BALDWIN

So what can we, in our time, learn from the past, even while we're getting knocked in the head? That the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. That compromise is the oxygen of democracy. And that we learn the most from those who came before not by gazing up at them uncritically or down on them condescendingly but by looking them in the eye and taking their true measure as human beings, not as gods.

Once, when a Republican congressman from Massachusetts accused Lincoln of having changed his mind, Lincoln replied, "Yes, I have; and I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

As a rule, politicians tend to remember the things they wish to emulate or the things they hope to avoid.

But as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once said, "Righteousness is easy, also cheap, in retrospect." When we condemn posterity for slavery, or for Native American removal, or for denying women their full role in the life of the nation, we ought to pause and think: What injustices are we perpetuating even now that will one day face the harshest of verdicts by those who come after us?