Quotes About Reflection

The wise are doubtful,' Socrates returned, 'and I should not be singular if I too doubted.

The oracle has spoken. But for me, already old age is my companion

There lies less good than most believe In ale for mortal men. A man knows nothing if he knows not That wealth oft begets an ape. A coward thinks he will live forever If only he can shun warfare. Tell one your thoughts, but beware of two. All know what is known to three. A silly man lies awake all night, Thinking of many things. When the morning comes he is worn with care, And his trouble is just as it was.

The habit of questioning everything can be dangerous, for sooner or later it will surely bring a man into head-on collision with the unquestionable, and he will not be able in conscience to draw aside.

Have you no errand I can do for you in hell?' he said. 'There's cleaner company there.

And telling a story, I suppose, is like winding a skein of spun yarn- you sometimes lose track of the beginning.

At some point we must plunge in to discover a greater expanse; yet when this broader horizon does appear, a new depth will open up at our point of entry.

Once while Edith was visiting the cathedral of Frankfurt, a woman with a market basket entered and knelt down in one of the pews to pray briefly. This was something entirely new to her, leaving as deep an impression as the university lectures.

So he writes for contemplative souls, and at a very particular point along their way he wants to take them by the hand, at a crossroad where most halt, perplexed, not knowing how to proceed.

There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you - I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you.

In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.

Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart

It seems cruel, she said, that after a while nothing matters... any more than these little things that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labelled: 'Use unknown.' Yes, but meanwhile - Ah, meanwhile -

Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.

Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now

The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.

As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled dreams of an inarticulate lifetime.

he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life

Two ways to be a light for all, is to be a flaming candle or the mirror that reflects it

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny.

And for a long while they stood side by side without speaking, each seeing the other in every line of the landscape.