Quotes About Reflection

When you learn how to die, you learn how to live.

Why is it [the unexamined life] not worth living? The unexamined life does not ponder questions like this: Who am I? Where am I? What ought I to do? What may I hope? The unexamined life does not evaluate alternative futures. It "lives with the flow." The unexamined life hears no evil and sees no evil. It is devoid of critical self-assessment. The unexamined life stifles the breath of reason. It violates a distinctive human capacity.

As persons committed to the examined life, each of us must take a stand on each of these questions--however provisional and preliminary that stand may be.

Here halt, I pray you, make a little stay,O wayfarer, to read what I have writ,And know by my fate what thy fate shall be.What thou art now, wayfarer, world renowned,I was: what I am now, so shall thou be.The world's delight I followed with a heartUnsatisfied: ashes am I, and dust.

O quam dulcis vita fuit dum sedabamus in quieti . . . inter liborum copias. : 'Oh how sweet life was when we sat quietly . . . midst all these books.

Growing up is never straight forward. There are moments when everything is fine, and other moments where you realize that there are certain memories that you'll never get back, and certain people that are going to change, and the hardest part is knowing that there's nothing you can do except watch them.

As long as you read this poem I will be writing it.

If you can work through the evidence, your faith and your experience will be much stronger in the end – and you won't have to be afraid anymore of what you might see in Scripture in an unguarded moment. I

In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.

When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.

At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.

never had there been so rare a day, or so rich a solitude top spend it in.

The months of the year, from January up to June, are a geometric progression in the abundance of distractions.

What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.

I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.

November is, for many reasons, the month for the axe

A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward.

Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over the rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it- a vast pulsing harmony- its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

One of the penalties of an ecological education, is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." Aldo Leopold (although I would personally strike out 'alone', thankfully)

Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?

I sit in happy mediation on my rock, pondering, while my line dries again, upon the ways of trout and men. How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook. Even so, I think there is some virtue to eagerness, whether its object prove true or false. How utterly dull would be a wholly prudent man, or trout, or world!

To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons.

If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from...

It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.