Quotes about Reflection

As for the person who is not impelled to give thanks for the procession of the stars, the alternation of day and night, the regular succession of the seasons, and the fruits which are produced for our enjoyment--how can such a person be counted as human at all?

I worked with Diodotus the Stoic, who made his residence in my house, and after a life of long intimacy died there only a short time ago.

If you have a garden in your library, nothing will fail

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.

Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.

Just because there's a silence doesn't mean that nothing is going on.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.

How were we to know we were happy?

We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.

Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts. The danger is grayout.