#Reflection Quotes

“I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.”

“Retire me to my Milan, whereEvery third thought shall be my grave.”

“I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; not the soldier's which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.”

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.”

“When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o'erflow?If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,Threatening the welkin with his big-swollen face?”

“Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent! And to see howmany of my old acquaintance are dead!”

“A turn or two I'll walkTo still my beating mind.”

“Go to you bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.”

“No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself, But by reflection, by some other things.”

“Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother: I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth.”

“Daughter of Time, the hypocrite Days,Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,And marching single in an endless file,Bring diadems and fagots in their hands;To each they offer gifts after his will,Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all;I, in my pleached garden watched the pompForgot my morning wishes, hastilyTook a few herbs and apples, and the DayTurned and departed silent. I too lateUnder her solemn fillet saw the scorn.”

“Chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy.”

“I am weary of a task which is done and I hope I shall not shrink when the aftermath ends. My only wish is to live peacefully out the remaining years - if years they be.”

“What seest thou elseIn the dark backward and abysm of time?”

“Reflection is the business of man; a sense of his state is his first duty: but who remembereth himself in joy? Is it not in mercy then that sorrow is allotted unto us?”

“Our enemies are our outward consciences.”

“Who could be so lucky? Who comes to a lake for water and sees the reflection of moon.”

“That is not the best sermon which makes the hearers go away talking to one another and praising the speaker, but which makes them go away thoughtful and serious, and hastening to be alone.”

“We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.”

“The solitary knows the essence of the thought, the scholar in society only its fair face.”

“We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours. I want to hold you close like a lute, so that we can cry out with loving. Would you rather throw stones at a mirror? I am your mirror and here are the stones.”

“Many of the faults you see in others, dear reader,are your own nature reflected in them.”

“The water in the stream may have changed many times, but the reflection of the moon and the stars remains the same.”

“I see my beauty in you.”

“Hindsight provides new eyes.”

“But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.”

“Love is a mirror. In it you see nothing except your reflection. You see nothing except your real face.”

“When you notice a fault in your neighbour, search for the same in yourself.”

“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?”

“Take time to be quiet.”

“I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British instead of the other way around, I might have gotten here on my own.”

“In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men.”

“Time passes swiftly, but is it not joyous to see how great and growing is the treasure we have gathered together, amid the storms and stresses of so many eventful and to millions tragic and terrible years?”

“Will you look back on life and say, 'I wish I had,' or 'I’m glad I did'?”

“I could not help reflecting that the bullet which had struck the chestnut [horse] had certainly passed within a foot of my head. So at any rate I had been 'under fire.' That was something.”

“All that I have said and done,Now that I am old and ill,Turns into a question tillI lie awake night after nightAnd never get the answers right.”

“The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of the state of your mind.”

“I am already sensible of decay in the power of walking, and find my memory not so faithful as it used to be. This may be partly owing to the incessant current of new matter flowing constantly through it; but I ascribe to years their share in it also.”

“I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Book of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.”

“Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!”

“Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.”

“Why should the imagination of a manLong past his prime remember things that areEmblematical of love and war?”

“It is a good thing to stand away from the canvas from time to time and take a full view of the picture.”

“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.”

“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business.”

“Real action is in silent moments.”

“Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory.”

“I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.”

“'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.”

“From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.”