Quotes About Reflection

Even if I could talk face to face with the pilot who dropped the bombs I would tell him, 'We cannot change history, but we should try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace.'

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

On Australia Day 2010, as we enter this second decade of the 21st century, Australians can be optimistic about our future, but we cannot afford to mistake optimism for complacency.

Our memories are our own, and we cannot blame anything or anyone in the past for any pain dwelling there. If we open the door to them or keep hashing over past incidents in our minds, we have only ourselves to blame.

So here is one of my theories on happiness: we cannot know if we have lived a truly happy life until the very end. This view of life and death was reinforced by my close witnessing of the buildup to the death of Philip Gould. Philip was without doubt my closest friend in politics. When he died, I felt like I had lost a limb.

We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it.

We cannot observe external things without some degree of Thought; nor can we reflect upon our Thoughts, without being influenced in the course of our reflection by the Things which we have observed.

We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and - to our benefit! - has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, 'Now we finally know ourselves.'

We cannot do justice to the deeds of former times if we do not in some degree remove ourselves from the circumstances in which we stand and substitute those by which the real actors were surrounded.

When we consider the beginning of our life, and compare the same with the eternal life, which we have in the promise, we cannot say nor find that we are at home in this life.

We cannot go anywhere with anger that we haven't already been.

We all desire things that we believe we cannot have, and so my films reflect that again and again. The mystery must be solved, the goal attained.

We cannot consume our way into personal growth. Yet, millions of us have bought into this cynical concept of faux identity.

We must learn from the past, but we cannot dwell in the past.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

We walk ourselves into ruts so deep we cannot see over them.

We cannot undo the past in this misguided war in Iraq.

One of the most important things that I did to turn my life around was to realize and to accept that from this minute, that's all we have. Everything that happened behind us we cannot change so you might as well look to the future.

Yom HaShoah is a vital day in the Jewish calendar, providing us with a focal point for our remembrance. We cannot bring the dead back to life, but we can bring their memory back to life and ensure they are not forgotten. We can undertake in our lives to do what they were so cruelly prevented from doing in theirs.

Can we ignore what is going on around us, can we disconnect ourselves, our own material situation, our spiritual selves, who we are, can we disconnect that from history and the social context of our lives? The older I get, the more I'm convinced that we cannot, that we are social creatures.

The simple truth of our finiteness is that we could, by whatever means, go on interminably only at the price of either losing the past and, therewith, our identity, or living only in the past and therefore without a real present. We cannot seriously wish either and thus not a physical enduring at that price.

I must believe that in words we will find what in fury we cannot.

My view is that we cannot be ruled by fear. When we do that, we are not making ourselves see. We are not thinking things through. We are not looking at what works.

We cannot keep on carrying burdens of the past and keep ruining our future.