Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Reflection.
Reflection makes men cowards.
William Hazlitt
There was a brief silence in which the distant echo of Hagrid smashing down a wooden front door seemed to reverberate through the intervening years.
J.K. Rowling
May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day:Time is the school in which we learn,Time is the fire in which we burn.
Delmore Schwartz, Summer Knowled
A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation.
Soren Kierkegaard
You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out. But whole species of feelings. And if you are wise, you will never pity the past for what it did not know. But pity yourself for what it did.
John Fowles, The Magus
When you put your hand to the plow, you can't put it down until you get to the end of the row.
Alice Paul
Everybody is like a magnet. You attract to yourself reflections of that which you are. If you're friendly then everybody else seems to be friendly too.
David R. Hawkins
In retrospect, the past seems not one existence with a continuous flow of years and events that follow each other in logical sequence, but a life periodically dividing into entirely separate compartments. Change of surroundings, interests, pursuits, has made it seem actually more like different incarnations.
Eleanor Robson Belmont, recalled
Reflection is the business of man; a sense of his state is his first duty: but who remembereth himself in joy? Is it not in mercy then that sorrow is allotted unto us?
William Shakespeare
I'll read enoughWhen I do see the very book indeedWhere all my sins are writ, and that's myself.Give me that glass and therein will I read.No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struckSo many blows upon this face of mineAnd made no deeper wounds?O flattering glass,Like to my followers in prosperityThou dost beguile me!
How strange is the lot of us mortals Each of us is here for a brief sojourn for what purpose he knows not, though he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.
Albert Einstein
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
Your life is a reflection you don't get what you WANT, you get what you ARE. You gotta BE it to SEE it.
Steve Maraboli
What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky.
Victor Hugo
The ages of seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.
Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game
I'm in a period of growth and expansion. I'm taking long, hard looks at the world and what's happening in it, analyzing and thinking. I'm trying to become acquainted with the universe -- with the part of it I occupy -- and trying to settle, for myself, what my relationship with it is.as cited by Susan Sackett, author of Inside Trek: A Star Trek Memoir, used with permission
Gene Roddenberry, Starlog Magazi
Deliberation. The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
Ambrose Bierce
Again at Park Corner. We came up to Kensington yesterday evening and drove down here. It was a beautiful evening and our drive was delightful. Besides, for me it had the charm of old scenes revisited. And when we came over the Irishtown hills and saw the beautiful gulf again and heard its low distant murmur, I thought of another evening long ago
Lucy Maud Montgomery, (from her
The individual (no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it) does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of Reflection or the seductive ambiguities of Reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Present A
