Reflection Quotes
1. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
2. We always see our worst selves. Our most vulnerable selves. We need someone else to get close enough to tell us we’re wrong. Someone we trust.
3. All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
4. Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).
5. Reflect upon your present blessings — of which every man has many — not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
6. Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.
7. When you loved someone and had to let them go, there will always be that small part of yourself that whispers, “What was it that you wanted and why didn’t you fight for it?
8. Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?
9. Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you’re just a reflection of him?
10. One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers.
11. If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.
12. That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.” Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. “Real love, real friends, real body parts…
13. The type of person you are is usually reflected in your business. To improve your business, first improve yourself.
14. The writer’s curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored.
15. Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.
16. Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul like you.
17. Sorry, always sorry. What in the world can you buy with an apology?
18. Sometimes, you have to look back in order to understand the things that lie ahead.
19. People will walk in and walk out of your life, but the one whose footstep made a long lasting impression is the one you should never allow to walk out.
20. I couldn’t imagine that I’d ever fall in love again like I had with Gideon. For better or worse, he was my soulmate. The other half of me. In many ways, he was my reflection.
21. I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.
22. I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn
23. Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.
24. Quiet people always know more than they seem. Although very normal, their inner world is by default fronted mysterious and therefore assumed weird. Never underestimate the social awareness and sense of reality in a quiet person; they are some of the most observant, absorbent persons of all.
25. Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.
26. I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.
27. Nico was devastatingly alone. He’d lost his big sister Bianca. He’d pushed away all other demigods who’d tried to get close to him. His experiences at Camp Half-Blood, in the Labyrinth and in Tartarus had left him scarred, afraid to trust anyone.
28. Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy ready-made things in the shops. But since there are no shops where you can buy friends, men no longer have any friends.
29. It takes a certain ingenuous faith – but I have it – to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.
30. There was a brief silence in which the distant echo of Hagrid smashing down a wooden front door seemed to reverberate through the intervening years.
31. Now the wren has gone to roost and the sky is turnin’ gold
And like the sky my soul is also turnin’
Turnin’ from the past, at last and all I’ve left behind
32. There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.
33. Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours; whenever she was alone, she gave way to it as the greatest relief; and not a day went by without a solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of unpleasant recollections.
34. That’s why Twinkle likes the place so much, Scott thought, looking around at the faded wood veneer tables, and the faded souls drinking at them. Misery was soaked through the place like the old beer soaked through its carpets.
35. No – the light in Tamani’s eyes was much more than a reflection. It was the fire that melted her anger and devestated her resolve, every single time she saw it.
36. Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams.
37. Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It’s always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings.
38. If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.
39. The moon is the reflection of your heart and moonlight is the twinkle of your love.
40. The secret and the sacred are sisters. When the secret is not respected, the sacred vanishes. Consequently, reflection should not shine too severe or aggressive a light on the world of the soul.
41. The wind god Favonius had warned him in Croatia: If you let your anger rule you … your fate will be even sadder than mine. But how could his fate be anything but sad? Even if he lived through this quest, he would have to leave both camps forever. That was the only way he would find peace. He wished there was another option – a choice that didn’t hurt like the waters of the Phlegethon – but he couldn’t see one.
42. There’s just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It’s not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it’s that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don’t see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren’t there.
43. If we learn to reflect on a paramount strategy and recognize the proper tactics, we may come to find out how we can rule the stormy waves of our lives since action and reflection have to unite in braving the tortuous windings and turnings of the paths ahead.
44. Let’s dare to prepare for living in an unchartered terrain, in a house with no name, and no number, if the sinking feeling of a musty relationship kills our spirit and exiles us from ourselves. Retraction and reflection allow us to rediscover and renew ourselves, in time.
45. Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside.
46. While retreating timely into a break of reflection, we can conquer the sanity of our mental condition and find a piece of stillness in the flurry of the world.
47. Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled.
48. A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
49. When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.
50. Because you’re a creation of God, you reflect the Divine qualities of creativity, wisdom, and love.
51. The past can’t be changed, can it? It can just be forgiven.
52. Usually, when the distractions of daily life deplete our energy, the first thing we eliminate is the thing we eliminate is the thing we need the most: quiet, reflective time. Time to dream, time to contemplate what’s working and what’s not, so that we can make changes for the better.
53. Each time a person passes by you and you say ‘hello’, imagine that person turning into a candle. The more positivity, love and light you reflect, the more light is mirrored your way. Sharing beautiful hellos is the quickest way to earn spiritual brownie points. You should start seeing hellos as small declarations of faith. Every time you say hello to a stranger, your heart acknowledges over and over again that we are all family.
54. People like us, we think differently, don’t we? We are different. We do all the things that others do. But when it comes down to it, we don’t need anyone else. We’re happy doing what we do and having obligation interferes with that. And sometimes I think we don’t even need ourselves. What’s most important is to find out whether we’re right or not.
55. When an incidental color or a random fragrance takes possession of our imagination, we can unexpectedly blossom into a new entity as it gives us wings and enlightens our horizon, just like canary birds that feel stimulated and start singing as soon as they sense the radiance of the sun through the reflection of the skylight.
56. Living in a way that reflects one’s values is not just about what you do, it is also about how you do things.
57. I’d like to have enough time and quiet
To think about absolutely nothing,
To not ever feel myself living,
To only know myself in others’ eyes, reflected.
58. Water is the most versatile of all elements. It isn’t afraid to burn in fire or fade into the sky, it doesn’t hesitate to shatter against sharp rocks in rainfall or drown into the dark shroud of the earth. It exists beyond all eginnings and ends. On the surface nothing will shift, but deep in underground silence, water will hide and with soft fingers coax a new channel for itself, until stone gives in and slowly settles around the secret space.
Death is water’s close companion, and neither of them can be separated from us, for we are made of the versatilitiy of water and the closeness of death. Water doesn’t belong to us, be we belong to water: when it has passed through our fingers and pores and bodies, nothing separates us from earth.
59. Remember your connection with the cosmos. Remember your connection with the infinity and that remembrance will give you the freedom.
60. Once you reject fear, you will become the perfect candidate to receive and reflect Truth.
