Quotes about Reflection

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Never read a book that is not a year old.

Years teach much which the days never knew.

The days come and go but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages.

He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments

Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.

In the woods is perpetual youth. In the woods we return to faith and reason.