Quotes About Reflection

A revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good.

there is no circumstance, in all the contradictions of our most mysterious nature, that appears to be more humiliating than the use we are disposed to make of those sad examples which seem purposely marked for our correction and improvement.

To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power, teach obedience, and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government, that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, and combing mind.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power; teach obedience: and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.

_Stulti est dixisse, Non putaram_.

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

Man is a most unwise, and a most wise, being. The individual is foolish. The multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost always acts right.

La meditación divina es una poderosa ayuda para engendrar en nosotros un desprecio del mundo y de todas las cosas mundanas

What are you going to do with your self now?'... 'I? said Fen. 'I shall pursue my orderly and dignified progress towards the grave.

We are so used to "doing" that it may seem like a chore just to "be.

Man with the Muckrake

LOOK NOW, IN YOUR IGNORANCE, ON THE FACE OF DEATH.

Reading, as he has explained to Trevelyan, is for him the purest imaginative therapy.

Le Chasseur des solitudes).

the most trenchant commentary was

As he waved at grizzled old Southerners, and they in turn waved the Stars and Stripes back at him, Roosevelt reflected that only thirty-three years before these men had been enemies of the Union.44 It took war to heal the scars of war; attack upon a foreign power to bring unity at home. But what future war would heal the scars of this one?

Oftimes it haps, that sorrowes of the mynd Find remedie vnsought, which seeking cannot fynd.

All this world's glory seemeth vain to me, And all their shows but shadows, saving she.

I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering—mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom—into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt.

I could certainly subscribe to the notion that life ends in old age, sickness, and death—but later, later.

People say young love or love of the moment isn't real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development, the mechanical elaboration of a crab canon with too many parts.

That's one of the problems—and joys—of old age: every time you read a book it's the first.

So," he said. "What's the difference between me and a whore?" He swallowed. "Am I a whore?" "No more than every married woman.