Quotes about Reflection

One knows what is right, but holds it at arm's length for a time, neither throwing it out, nor embracing it.

Indeed, when Luther's school-yard chum Hans Reinecke wrote to him of his father's death, Luther wrote, "Seldom if ever have I despised death as much as I do now." He said that it "has plunged me into deep sadness not only because he was my father but also because he loved me very much." Even more, he says, "through him my creator has given me all that I am and have.

Wilberforce is having thoughts now that seem utterly strange and foreign.

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people, that those liberties are the gift of God? That they are violated but with his wrath? I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep for ever.

Heard the Bible read two hours—Pascal one hour and a quarter—meditation one hour and a quarter…. Pitt called and commended Butler's Analogy—resolved to write to him, and discover to him what I am occupied about: this will save me much embarrassment, and I hope give me more command both of my time and conduct.

There is power in remembrance, recalling, and memorial celebration.

While Hildebrandt, Niemöller, and Jacobi were thinking about how to defeat Müller, Bonhoeffer was thinking about God's highest call, about the call of discipleship and its cost.

Wilberforce wrote some years later that it was as if he'd been all those years in a dream from which at last now he had been awakened.

Surely this sabbath, of all others, calls forth these feelings in a supreme degree; a frame of united love and triumph well becomes it, and holy confidence and unrestrained affection.

Ideas have far-reaching consequences, and one must be ever so careful about what one allows to lodge in one's brain.

When we come to see the superlatively extreme precariousness of our existence, and begin to understand how by any accounting, we ought not to exist, what are we to think or feel? Our existence seems to be not merely a virtually impossible miracle but the most outrageous miracle conceivable, one that makes previously amazing miracles seem like almost nothing.

Wilberforce's time at Cambridge over two hundred years ago sounds extraordinarily like the experience of many college students today.