Reflection Quotes

Gillman smiles, in the cold manner of an assassin. It's like looking in the mirror.

~ Irvine Welsh

Be a reflection of what you'd like to see in others. You get in return what you give.

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

There is nothing like a train journey for reflection.

~ Tahir Shah

Encouraging employees to interact directly with the environment is just an interesting exercise until you debrief their experiences and encourage reflection.

~ Julie Winkle Giulioni

To be no more than scholarly reflection on its object from one particular standpoint, which is anyway one legitimate standpoint among others.

~ Hans Küng

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass...There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.

~ George Macdonald

I have begun to wonder where I came from. The person I am now, this fumbling, stumbling supplicant... was I built on the foundations of my old life, or did I rise from the grave a blank state? How much of me is inherited, and how much is my own creation? Questions that were once just idle musings have begun to feel strangely urgent. Am I firmly rooted to what came before? Or can I choose to deviate?

~ Isaac Marion

...that icy glass reduces your beauty - dims your fire - let me be your mirror...

~ John Geddes

Sometimes people don't get sick from bacteria or a virus- -living organisms alien to the human body- -but from the human brain itself. Our brains can be our worst enemy, our cruelest opponent.

~ Buket Uzuner

He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the impact of the axe. The cardinal when he fell had no persecutor more relentless than Thomas More. Yet, he thinks, I did not hate him. I exercised my skills to the utmost to persuade him to reconcile with the king. And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.

~ Hilary Mantel

If you are trying to bring about a better future, you must eery day go someplace you have not been before, to the point of no return. What happens every time you go to the point of no return? You push past your limits and open up new terrains of possibility. Each challenge accepted leads to greater ability when you confront the next.

~ Dov Seidman

Wisdom is the fruits of reflection...

~ Gino Norris

Biographer diagnoses reaction to restriction as a tell of true character. Some use even prison as a time of reflection and planning. Others, like Churchill, quickly chafe at missing interaction and opportunity.

~ William Manchester

It was all he'd felt for too long to change now. Maybe it was too late for any other kind of life. This was all he knew. It was safe, insulated. Familiar. An absense of emotion kept him sane. Or what passed for it.

~ Virginia Brown

Sometimes truths are what we run from, and sometimes they are what we seek.

~ R.d. Ronald

Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you’re a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.

~ Megan Abbott

I miss those times when I hadn't a clue.

~ Marina Leigh Hatfield

Your life is a reflection… you don't get what you WANT, you get what you ARE. You gotta BE it to SEE it.

~ Steve Maraboli

...dark furrow lines grid the snow, punctuated by orange abacus beads of pumpkins - now the crows own the field...

~ John Geddes

And though I've lived to be an old man with my very own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.

~ Tim Winton

Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.

~ Whitaker Chambers

When evening comes, I go back home, and go to my study. On the threshold I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, I enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died. There I am warmly welcomed, and I feed on the only food I find nourishing, and was born to savor. I am not ashamed to talk to them, and to ask them to explain their actions. And they, out of kindness, answer me. Four hours go by without my feeling any anxiety. I forget every worry. I am no longer afraid of poverty, or frightened of death. I live entirely through them.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

What wild undisturbed corners do you leave within you or within your partner, your children, your parents, your closest friends? What is left respectfully and quietly for passive cultivation, for privacy, for the imagination, for discovery, for serendipity, for faith, for secrecy, for grace, for reverence, for the untapped, for the future, for the unknowable and the unknown?

~ Kathryn Hall

Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever- the blasphemer, the dissenter- will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies.

~ Ken Kesey

This is how it essentially is for Bunny Junior. He loves his dad. He thinks there is no dad better, cleverer, or more capable, and he stands there beside him with a sense of pride — he's my dad — and he also, of course, stands beside him because he has nowhere else to go.

~ Nick Cave

Style is a reflection of your attitude and your personality.

~ Shawn Ashmore

Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.

~ Steven Biko

As fandom grew more variegated, genzines reflected a broadening of interests, carrying personal columns of humor and reflection, science articles, amateur fiction, stylish gossip, and inevitably, thoughtful pieces on the future of fandom.

~ Gregory Benford

Throughout this evolution from left to right, Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces.

~ Samuel E. Morison

I thank God for my failures. Maybe not at the time but after some reflection. I never feel like a failure just because something I tried has failed.

~ Dolly Parton

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

~ Thomas Merton

Your self-esteem won't come from body parts. You need to step away from the mirror every once in a while, and look for another reflection, like the one in the eyes of the people who love you and admire you.

~ Stacy London

It's cool to be a part of recovery. This is just who I am, this is what I write about, what I do, and most of my work has been a reflection of what I've been going through in one way or another.

~ Chester Bennington

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.

~ Edward Sapir

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

~ Eugenio Montale

Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.

~ John Berger

As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.

~ Michael Pollan

Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing but of reflection.

~ Winston Churchill

My brothers and sisters, true love is a reflection of the Savior's love. In December of each year we call it the Christmas spirit. You can hear it. You can see it. You can feel it.

~ Thomas S. Monson

Christmas 1972 was a lonely time for Kissinger, as well as for his boss, and a period of serious reflection. Kissinger was then a bachelor, enamored of the tall, elegant, but elusive WASP Nancy Maginnes, but still very much a bachelor - Washington's most sought-after bachelor.

~ Alistair Horne