Quotes about Reflection

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

Youth is wasted on the young.

You never really learn much from hearing yourself speak.

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one's own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

Maxims are texts to which we turn in danger or sorrow, and we often find what seems to have been expressly written for our use.

I was a romantic and sentimental creature, with a tendency towards solitude.

After a few months without writing, months I've lived turned outward... I fear going deaf, not being able to hear the silence.

January 8 has been a lucky day for me. I have started all my books on that day, and all of them have been well received by the readers. I write eight to ten hours a day until I have a first draft, then I can relax a little. I am very disciplined. I write in silence and solitude. I light a candle to call inspiration and the muses, and I surround myself with pictures of the people I love, dead and alive.

I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.