Reflection quotes
1.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside reflection — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I will be my undoing, If I become my obsession. I will forget the ones I love, If I do not serve them. I will war with others, If I refuse to see them. Therefore, I choose to turn away From my reflection, To rely not on myself But on my brothers and sisters, To project always outward Until I disappear [And only God remains.]"
"The dark is a quiet place. Reflection and contemplation are the only things to do in it. Well that, and imagine the worst things possible. I don’t have to reflect or contemplate or any of those things. I know what the worst things possible are. I know about the things that hide in the dark. Insanity is the least of them."
"It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection."
"Have you ever happened, reader, to feel that subtle sorrow of parting with an unloved abode? The heart does not break, as it does in parting with dear objects. The humid gaze does not wander around holding back a tear, as if it wished to carry away in it a trembling reflection of the abandoned spot; but in the best corner of our hearts we feel pity for the things which we did not bring to life with our breath, which we hardly noticed and are now leaving forever. This already dead iventory will not be resurrected in one's memory."
"You must realize that what you are cannot be seen in a mirror. What you see in a mirror is but a dim reflection of your true reality."
"This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects."
"The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated."
"If your outer life is really a reflection of the quality of your inner life, then it's a brilliant move to spend at least an hour a day working on yourself."
"It's crazy when you see very little reflection between what's played on the radio and what people are talking about in the streets. It lets you know how far off we are from a real movement."
"Your life is a reflection of how you think"
"It carried quite a wallop. I have all the classic symptoms. Reflection. Where am I now? Where have I come from? What's important? Dealing with the moment of a different kind of feeling for mortality. Shifting of the body. Contextualizing or reevaluating behaviors and values. All those kinds of things."
"Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid--necessarily goes to the roots of action! Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?"
"A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection."
"A good American friend of mine who has lived in India for many years, working as a journalist, was recently denied entry to the country because he wrote on Kashmir. This is a reflection of fractures within society. Pakistan, too, has to focus on the Lashkar [Lashkar-i-Taiba] and other similar groups and work towards some sort of sensible compromise on Kashmir."
"Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end."
"When the evening was over, Anne could not be amused…nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination."
"Our souls need time to think, dream, and reflect."
"Sometimes it just amazes me how many people desperately want to protect my personal information. Ten thousand reflections hide the true gem. Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
"If you immerse yourself too single-mindedly in your chosen art form whether it's video games, movies, comics or whatever, your work can easily become just a reflection of what others are doing in that field rather than breaking new ground."
"Upon reflection, I decided I had three main weaknesses: I was confused (evidenced by a lack of facts, an inability to coordinate my thoughts, and an inability to verbalize my ideas); I had a lack of confidence, which cause me to back down from forcefully stated positions; and I was overly emotional at the expense of careful, 'scientific' though. I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was."
