Quotes about Reflection

In the past it never occurred to me that every casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise I would have crept further into my shell.

Every reminiscence is colored by the way things are today, and therefore by a delusive point of view.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

The strange things about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost. One feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when the sea flows in our veins...and the stars are our jewels, when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure?

What I know of the divine sciences and Holy Scripture, I learnt in woods and fields. I have had no other masters than the beeches and the oaks." And

Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor.

Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and incomprehensible.

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.