Quotes About Reflection

3. Another common misconception: You need to learn from your mistakes. What do you really learn from mistakes? You might learn what not to do again, but how valuable is that? You still don't know what you should do next. Contrast that with learning from your successes.

Human life spans, regrettably, were a couple of centuries too short for patience to stop being a virtue and become a habit.

Failure most of all. The greatest teacher failure is.

Slow down and think. Panic doesn't solve problems; it just creates new ones.

Innovators "view failure not as a fatal character flaw but as a learning experience.

Great companies [inevitably] develop a rowboat mentality," says Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony. They are "always looking behind to past successes" with awe and admiration as they row into the future.

What we don't get as easily is that when we tap into our personal experience, the most vivid collection of life data at our disposal, we're relying on a similarly small sample size to draw conclusions.

The simple choice to pray usually happens to the exclusion of something else in our lives. Often that something else is frivolous, but at times prayer must come at the expense of important things, such as our own work, our sleep or our time with loved ones.

It's easier to write from my own life, and it's also more fun. I always write about relationships, for instance, whether they're romantic relationships, friendships, encounters... there's always a lesson to be learned from them.

They say it's better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. I disagree.

I really enjoy theater. I just went to see 'Death of a Salesman ' and it knocked me on my ass.

As far as writing, I like watching bad movies. Nothing stops me in my tracks more than watching a great film like 'The Godfather' or 'Dog Day Afternoon' or 'The Graduate.' You watch one of those, and you never want to write again. Whereas with bad movies, it makes you think, If that counts, I certainly could write.

I'm not Michael Moore. I think Michael Moore wants to tell you how to think. He wants to give you answers. I make movies to raise my own personal questions and not to give answers.

I'm trying to figure myself out through my movies. Whether it's big stuff like what we're doing here, or little stuff like, 'Why aren't I happier?' With every film I feel like I'm apologising for something. I feel I'm most successful when I'm looking for something that embarrasses me about my character that I'd like to expose.

Don't get me wrong, Mallory. She's a good person. She has a big heart. And she would do anything for Teddy's well-being. But this is not the life I wanted. I never signed on for any of this.

I like being alone and I think this movie, as much as it is an investigation of connection and people bonding, I also think it's just as much about loneliness.

Find some humility, or it will find you.

I got up and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, first thinking about how great I looked, then thinking about how the cops weren't going to catch me.

Will I be able to spare my heart while dissecting memories of the past?

Maybe—like what the guard said at the gate of the Sun Street—I should not pry open the bleeding wounds of the past. Maybe I should just try to keep my good old memories.

After vacancy has dusted off the cobwebs of our unsettled recollections, we reach out one more time

The pause we're experiencing can highlight a basic truth: we may or may not walk this way again, and even if we do, we will never be precisely the same people who experienced that journey in the first place. Travel is only ever about a moment in time and space, but it's also about how we choose to hold that moment in our memories. It is always both present and past.

Sorry," [Hamlet] said, rubbing his temples. "I don't know what came over me. All of a sudden I had this overwhelming desire to talk for a very long time without actually doing anything.

Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment--the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse.