Quotes about Reflection

Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heard why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope. What good did I get from it? I got to have love in my heart.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.

A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

Sometimes...I wander about in this house that Nathan and I renewed, that is now aged and worn by our life in it. How many steps, wearing the thresholds? I look at it all again. Sometimes it fills to the brim with sorrow, which signifies the joy that has been here, and the love. It is entirely a gift.

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what's bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

I've come down from the sky like some damned ghost, delayed too long…To the abandoned fields the trees returned and grew. They stand and grow. Time comes To them, time goes, the trees Stand; the only place They go is where they are. Those wholly patient ones… They do no wrong, and they Are beautiful. What more Could we have thought to ask?... I stand and wait for light to open the dark night. I stand and wait for prayer to come and find me here.

In solitude, we lose our loneliness.

I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.

One thing work gives is the joy of not working, a minute here or there when I stand and only breathe, receiving the good of the air. It comes back. Good work done comes back into the mind, a free breath drawn.

You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.

Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when I am too old to work much and am mostly alone.

When you have gone too far, as I think he did, the only mending is to come home.