Quotes About Reflection

History is the autobiography of a madman.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

The road to the mountain of holiness first passes through the valley of humility.

Phantasy provides a kind of temporary glue, which keeps people from falling apart through the production of illusions which enable them somehow to live with themselves.

It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.

You will stay in therapy as long as you feel it is worth the time, effort and money you invest.

Wisdom is balance, and a three-legged stance (old man), like a three-legged stool, offers the best balance. When one has become older, one knows that doing is valid only when it enhances being and that thinking makes sense only if it stems from feeling.

To-day is given us mainly that we may learn to know God better, and to love Him more, and to serve Him more joyfully.

Most diaries are moans in writing, even when the person writing them is happy.

Diaries teach us that it is too much to be inside anybody's head. It is a horrible place. All that repetition; that endless analysis that doesn't analyze, just mulls a point over and over until it drops dead from banality.

The feeling that everyone feels, of a life not lived.

Her ordinariness, and the fact that she has written so much about it, is what makes her interesting.

A person can write five million words about itself, and forget to tell you its name. Or its sex. People don't include obvious identifiers in diaries: things such as what they're called or where their home is. They are simply 'I' who lives.

The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.

Do not act meanly, do not be unkind, because the time for setting things right may pass before your heart changes course. Isabel Dalhousie

We don't forget.... Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.

I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me.

I mean, look, I love movies, not just the ones I make... In fact, I don't like the movies I make very much.

You just never know when you're living in a golden age.

I like to think about the life of wine, how it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing, how the sun was shining, if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And, if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now.

I get asked, 'How can you have such failures in your films?' Well, what else is life about? There's some sense of constant failure in something. Humor gives you a distance from it.

The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.

I think cynicism is more enduring than sentimentality.

How glowing guilt exalts the keen delight!