Quotes about Reflection

Lenina suddenly remembered an occasion when, as a little girl at school, she had woken up in the middle of the night and become aware, for the first time, of the whispering that had haunted all her sleeps.

Shearwater sighed, like a whale in the night.

The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.

If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.

Choiceless awareness - at every moment and in all the circumstances of life - is the only effective meditation.

I, real I? But where, but how, but at what price?

But all the same," insisted the Savage, "it is natural to believe in God when you're alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death …" "But people never are alone now," said Mustapha Mond. "We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them ever to have it.

Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours in which he might have done so much, so much—written the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book.

Books, he said—books. One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the world. Great thick books about the universe and the mind and ethics. You've no idea how many there are. I must have read twenty or thirty tons of them in the last five years. Twenty tons of ratiocination. Weighted with that, one's pushed out into the world.

The wound is mortal and is mine.

Without absorption of the water of God's Word, there's no quenching our spiritual thirst. Meditation is the means of absorption.

In most Christian circles you will rarely hear fasting mentioned, and few will have read anything about it. And yet it's mentioned in Scripture more times even than something as important as baptism (about seventy-seven times for fasting to seventy-five for baptism).