135 Inspiring Reflection Quotes

In a rapidly evolving world, finding moments to pause and reflect can be both a challenge and a profound necessity. Reflection offers us the opportunity to learn from the past, understand ourselves better, and inspire meaningful change in our lives. In this carefully curated collection, we present 135 inspiring reflection quotes that capture the essence of introspection and personal growth. Whether you are seeking motivation, guidance, or a fresh perspective, these quotes serve as a gentle reminder of the power of reflection in shaping our journey. Join us as we explore words that resonate deeply, encouraging a thoughtful examination of our experiences and aspirations.

1. “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.” - A.C. Grayling

2. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” - Søren Kierkegaard

3. “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.” - Jane Austen

4. “Reflect upon your present blessings -- of which every man has many -- not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.” - Charles Dickens

5. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

6. “Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.” - Confucius

7. “Habit rules the unreflecting herd.” - William Wordsworth

8. “The WakingI wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.I learn by going where I have to go.We think by feeling. What is there to know?I hear my being dance from ear to ear.I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Of those so close beside me, which are you?God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,And learn by going where I have to go.Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Great Nature has another thing to doTo you and me, so take the lively air,And, lovely, learn by going where to go.This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.What falls away is always. And is near.I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.I learn by going where I have to go.” - Theodore Roethke

9. “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.” - Alberto Manguel

10. “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.” - David Levithan

11. “Sometimes, you have to look back in order to understand the things that lie ahead.” - Yvonne Woon

12. “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.” - Jess C. Scott

13. “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…” - Jess C. Scott

14. “Ir à lua e voltar não é tão desafiador quanto retornar à terra e ter de lidar com a humanidade.” - Buzz Aldrin

15. “Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace” - Dean Koontz

16. “There is, I believe, no person, however insignificant in the world, but, if an account of his life and adventures were committed to paper, would be entertaining in some degree: the follies of our own life, and those we are liable to be drawn into by others, will constantly afford matter for serious reflection.” - Henry Spencer Ashbee

17. “Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams. ” - D.H. Lawrence

18. “Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?” - Bill Watterson

19. “I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn” - Robert Frost

20. “There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.” - E.L. Doctorow

21. “I think before I act---and then think again. I am not entirely a coward, but I do not lose myself in action as you do.” - John Christopher

22. “Oh yes. It's open all right, but not many people come in here to look at me now so there's no point in selling tickets. No one is interested in a man who professes to be a monster. They'll give me notice very soon. I started out being a great attraction, but people soon understood that what fascinated them about me was no more than the reflection of their own deformities. All I do is how them what is inside themselves,' He added mournfully.” - Isobelle Carmody

23. “Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

24. “Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).” - Jess C. Scott

25. “Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.” - Poppy Z.Brite

26. “I took the sleeper out of Glasgow, and as the smelly old train bumped out of Central Station and across the Jamaica Street Bridge, I stared out at the orange halogen streetlamps reflected in the black water of the river Clyde. I gazed at the crumbling Victorian buildings that would soon be sandblasted and renovated into yuppie hutches. I watched the revelers and rascals traverse the shiny wet streets. I thought of the thrill and danger of my youth and the fear and frustration of my adult life thus far. I thought of the failure of my marriage and my failures as a man. I saw all this through my reflection in the nighttime window. Down the tracks I went, hardly aware that I was going further south with every passing second.” - Craig Ferguson

27. “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.” - J.K. Rowling

28. “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.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

29. “Many of the traditional approaches to interfaith dialogue have assumed that it can be successful only if agreements are reached about amorphous concepts and themes that various traditions may have in common. These approaches have also assumed that participants have to "weaken" or "compromise" elements of their own faith... this is not necessarily constructive for engaging in interfaith understanding and dialogue. It is only when participants have a deep understanding of their own religious traditions and are willing to learn and recognize the richness of other religious traditions that constructive cooperation can take place between groups from different faiths. (by Cilliers, Ch. 3, p. 57-58)” - David R. Smock

30. “What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” - Walt Whitman

31. “Only a fool can be happy. For happiness consists of two contradictory elements: contentment and pleasure. Enjoy pleasure and you have no contentment; be content and you have no pleasure. For this reason happiness is conceivable only for those who enjoy themselves without thinking that they will always want more and thus be discontented, or for those who are content without thinking that they have no pleasure. Whoever reflects can never be happy, unless he is a fanatic and thus blinded…thus exercising control over his intelligence with his feelings, instead of the other way round” - Marcellus Emants

32. “how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet” - Robert Browning

33. “For God’s sake, let us be mennot monkeys minding machinesor sitting with our tails curledwhile the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.” - D.H. Lawrence

34. “Real change will come when you focus on yourself - not on changing him, Real change comes when you are willing and able to state your claim on what you are and are not willing to live with. Just remember to let him in on it” - Dory Hollander

35. “One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers.” - Agatha Christie

36. “Friendship exhibits a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy, Holy" to one another (Isaiah VI, 3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have.” - C.S. Lewis

37. “Sometimes, a girl just has to dive under the duvet and regroup.” - Jody Gehrman

38. “An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.” - Russell Hoban

39. “He felt a little lost, after that experience. Lost as the girls on their knees. It was a never-ending story of young girls losing themselves, such that they were no longer humans with any souls or characters, but pretty girls with fat asses and nice tits.” - Jess C. Scott

40. “If you are in the mountains alone for some time, many days at minimum, & it helps if you are fasting. The forest grows tired of its weariness towards you; it resumes its inner life and allows you to see it. Near dusk the faces in tree bark cease hiding, and stare out at you. The welcoming ones and also the malevolent, open in their curiosity. In your camp at night you are able to pick out a distinct word now and then from the muddled voices in creek water, sometimes an entire sentence of deep import. The ghosts of animals reveal themselves to you without prejudice to your humanity. You see them receding before you as you walk the trail their shapes beautiful and sad.” - Charles Frazier

41. “Bewilderment increases in the presence of the mirrors.” - Tarjei Vesaas

42. “If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.” - Michel de Montaigne

43. “And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusty reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened and he entered. The next performance in the theater of Grenouille's soul was beginning.” - Patrick Suskind

44. “Well, it's a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don't weaken.” - Alan Sillitoe

45. “My mind to me a kingdom is,Such present joys therein I find,That it excels all other blissThat world affords or grows by kind.Though much I want which most would have,Yet still my mind forbids to crave.” - Edward Dyer

46. “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.” - Aprilynne Pike

47. “A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.” - Umberto Eco

48. “Now the wren has gone to roost and the sky is turnin' goldAnd like the sky my soul is also turnin'Turnin' from the past, at last and all I've left behind” - Ray Lamontagne

49. “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.” - Charles Mackay

50. “Because you’re a creation of God, you reflect the Divine qualities of creativity, wisdom, and love.” - Doreen Virtue

51. “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.” - Simon Morden

52. “His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivided and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of revery to find himself in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings.” - James Joyce

53. “All individuals have moral deficiencies, and when introducing these to reality one not only strengthens himself but also the confidence of others in the human exigency for Christ due to a reflection throughout the body of Christ.” - Criss Jami

54. “Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity” - Thornton Wilder

55. “They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think.” - Ellis Peters

56. “The girl in the mirror wasn't who I wanted to be and her life wasn't the one I wanted to have.” - Francesca Lia Block

57. “I love the dark hours of my being.My mind deepens into them.There I can find, as in old letters,the days of my life, already lived,and held like a legend, and understood.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

58. “The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.” - Barack Obama

59. “We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, — sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar….” - Henry David Thoreau

60. “There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.” - Siri Hustvedt

61. “piensa que el hecho de que no existan luchas, odio ni deseos significa que tampoco existen las cosas opuestas. Es decir, la alegría, la paz de espíritu, el amor. Porque es de la desesperanza, del desengaño y de la tristeza de donde nace la alegría y, sin ellas, ésta no podría existir. Es imposible encontrar una paz de espíritu sin desesperación” - Haruki Murakami

62. “I leaned over the sink, closer to my reflection, and stare at myself hard. I don't know what I see. I don't even know what I want to see.” - Nina LaCour

63. “Rarely if ever, moments come that are so defining in our lives. The years are glutted with benign matters which impact us more deeply than we could have ever imagined in our youth.” - Joel T. McGrath

64. “When I was a child, I understood the things of my childhood. Now that I have grown into a man, I understand less of the world than I did as a lad.” - Joel T. McGrath

65. “...real childhood scars heal, but not when band-aids replace self-reflection.” - Cameron Conaway

66. “Wisdom comes from reflection.” - Deborah Day

67. “Living in a way that reflects one's values is not just about what you do, it is also about how you do things.” - Deborah Day

68. “[My grandfather] returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession.” - Wendell Berry

69. “How did it make you feel?” - Irvine Welsh

70. “Your truest spiritual path will lead you to yourself for it is devoted to becoming.” - Mollie Marti

71. “Behind a life of influence you will find a masterful storyteller.” - Mollie Marti

72. “Our power lies in our small daily choices, one after another, to create eternal ripples of a life well lived.” - Mollie Marti

73. “Dialogic is not to be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, the love remaining with itself - this is called Lucifer.” - Martin Buber

74. “They seemed no closer to the tops of the peaks that rose before them. It was only by looking back, to the forest far below, that she knew they'd climbed.” - Kristin Cashore

75. “Pegi just recorded "I Don't Want to Talk About," written by Danny Whitten, the original Crazy Horse guitar player and singer who's all over Early Daze, an album of songs from the beginning of Crazy Horse that I have been working on compiling recently. Danny was every bit the artist I am, but he died of a heroin OD in the early seventies. Every time I hear Pegi sing that song, it makes me tremendously sad. She sings it so beautifully, phrasing it to break my heart. She does it justice. You can see I have some unfinished business with Danny.” - Neil Young

76. “It is always the first and last steps that are the hardest to take. We walk away and try not to turn back, or we stand just outside the gates, terrified to find what's waiting for us now that we've returned. In between, we stumble blindly from one place and life to the next. We try to do the best we can. There are moments like this, however, when we are neither coming nor going, and all we have to do is sit and look back on the life we have made.” - Dinaw Mengestu

77. “When you can no longer differentiate between the insanity spewed onto the blank page, and the madness evident in the all-but shattered mirror...that's when you know you're doing it right.” - Dave Matthes

78. “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

79. “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.” - Niccolo Machiavelli

80. “the abyss you stare into and that stares back at you is your reflection in the mirror - we all have it - that shadow self - that dark heart...” - John Geddes

81. “I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.” - Sebastian Faulks

82. “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.” - Sylvia Day

83. “Faith is a private matter, usually held deep within a person, quiet, impossible to recognise or understand, if you have no faith yourself” - Jennifer Worth

84. “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

85. “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

86. “Wisdom is the fruits of reflection...” - Gino Norris

87. “Deciding to wait, Scott sat down with a pint away from the bar at a corner table and lit a cigarette. The clientele in there on Sunday afternoon were the same as most other afternoons. From middle-aged to old men, drinking and cursing at the world like it was the last bus which had just left the stop without them.” - R.D. Ronald

88. “Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now.What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now?” - Bill Shapiro

89. “Let your confidence reflect your contentedness.” - Criss Jami

90. “The only real conflict you will ever have in your life won’t be with others, but with yourself.” - Shannon L. Alder

91. “Sometimes truths are what we run from, and sometimes they are what we seek.” - R.D. Ronald

92. “Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.” - David Mitchell

93. “We humans are prone to err, and to err systematically, outrageously, and with utter confidence. We are also prone to hold our mistaken notions dear, protecting and nourishing them like our own children. We defend them at great cost. We surround ourselves with safe people, people who will appreciate our cherished views. We avoid those who suggest that our exalted ideas, our little emperors, have no clothes.” - Valerie Tarico

94. “That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer enough, when we see these images. Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? All this, with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action.” - Susan Sontag

95. “There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.” - Susan Sontag

96. “Everything needs love… and everything you do or don’t do is a reflection of how you love you!” - Sanjo Jendayi

97. “Do not hide your light for fear of what others may think of you. Let it shine and be a reflection of what is possible.” - Kristi Bowman

98. “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

99. “Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.” - Whitaker Chambers

100. “I'll read enoughWhen I do see the very book indeedWhere all my sins are writ, and that's myself.Give me that glass and therein will I read.No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struckSo many blows upon this face of mineAnd made no deeper wounds?O flattering glass,Like to my followers in prosperityThou dost beguile me!” - William Shakespeare

101. “How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?” - Ann Brashares

102. “We were left with nothing because of a love like acid that ate its way through our entire family.” - R.D. Ronald

103. “[T]he man who meditates is a depraved animal.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau

104. “Some people are born with a vital and responsive energy. It not only enables them to keep abreast of the times; it qualifies them to furnish in their own personality a good bit of the motive power to the mad pace. They are fortunate beings. They do not need to apprehend the significance of things. They do not grow weary nor miss step, nor do they fall out of rank and sink by the wayside to be left contemplating the moving procession.Ah! that moving procession that has left me by the road-side! Its fantastic colors are more brilliant and beautiful than the sun on the undulating waters. What matter if souls and bodies are failing beneath the feet of the ever-pressing multitude! It moves with the majestic rhythm of the spheres. Its discordant clashes sweep upward in one harmonious tone that blends with the music of other worlds--to complete God's orchestra.It is greater than the stars--that moving procession of human energy; greater than the palpitating earth and the things growing thereon. Oh! I could weep at being left by the wayside; left with the grass and the clouds and a few dumb animals. True, I feel at home in the society of these symbols of life's immutability. In the procession I should feel the crushing feet, the clashing discords, the ruthless hands and stifling breath. I could not hear the rhythm of the march.Salve! ye dumb hearts. Let us be still and wait by the roadside.” - Kate Chopin

105. “Once a day, especially in the early years of life and study, call yourselves to an account what new ideas, what new proposition or truth you have gained, what further confirmation of known truths, and what advances you have made in any part of knowledge.” - Isaac Watts

106. “Armon stared into the wild darkness of his opponent and saw a reflection of his own fall.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

107. “I miss those times when I hadn't a clue.” - Marina Leigh Duff

108. “Ruin still used Reen’s voice—it was familiar, something that had always seemed a part of her. Discovering that it belonged to that thing…it was like finding out that her reflection really belonged to someone else, and that she’d never actually seen herself.” - Brandon Sanderson

109. “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

110. “Pick the weeds and keep the flowers.” - Kelly Clarkson

111. “I write romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” - Angeline M. Bishop

112. “I write about romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” - Angeline M. Bishop

113. “I remember making that vow, the one not to forget. Not to remember what happened, but to remember who I was and how I felt.” - Neil Gaiman

114. “...that icy glass reduces your beauty - dims your fire - let me be your mirror...” - John Geddes

115. “Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?” - Edith Wharton

116. “Pero quién no es, de vez en cuando, una mancha en la vida de alguien” - Alejandro Zambra

117. “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

118. “...Sunday evenings are heavier than clouds with rain, darker too and often interminable...” - John Geddes

119. “...poetry is paying attention to life when all the world seems asleep to its beauties and truths...” - John Geddes

120. “...I see myself at crossroads in my life, mapless, lacking bits of knowledge - then, the Moon breaks through, lights up the path before me...” - John Geddes

121. “...I'm a modern mountebank - I believe in Physiognomy - after all, we are in control of our face - it's the map of where we've been...” - John Geddes

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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “Your life is a reflection of how effectively you balance potential and kinetic energy.” - Steve Maraboli

126. “Absolute trust in the reality of things begins to be shaken as the problem of truth enters upon the scene. The moment man ceases merely to live in and with reality and demands a knowledge of this reality, he moves into a new and fundamentally different relation to it. At first, to be sure, the question of truth seems to apply only to particular parts and not to the whole of reality. Within this whole different strata of validity begin to be marked off, reality seems to separate sharply from appearance. But it lies in the very nature of the problem of truth that once it arises it never comes to rest. The concept of truth conceals an immanent dialectic that drives it inexorably forward, forever extending its limits.” - Ernst Cassirer

127. “Your inability to see the wisdom in someone else is not a reflection on their lack of perspicacity, it is a reflection on yours.” - Ilyas Kassam

128. “Unless you are silent, you will notknow your urgent heart, how it beatsbetween the thin skin of yes and no.” - Drew Myron

129. “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.” - Khushwant Singh

130. “Cyrano: The leaves---Roxane: What color---Perfect Venetian red! Look at them fall.Cyrano: Yes---they know how to die. A little wayFrom the branch to the earth, a little fearOf mingling with the common dust---and yetThey go down gracefully---a fall that seemsLike flying!” - Edmond Rostand

131. “[There's a] point where you have to leave the dough alone. It's silly to anthropomorphize bread, but I love the fact that it needs to sit quietly, to retreat from touch and noise and drama, in order to evolve. I have to admit, I often feel that way myself.” - Jodi Picoult

132. “There is nothing like fear to complicate one's consciousness, inducing previously unknown levels of reflection” - Thomas Ligotti

133. “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

134. “The outer world is a reflection of our inner selves.” - Bryant McGill

135. “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