91 Inspiring Reflection Quotes

In our fast-paced world, taking a moment to pause and reflect can be incredibly powerful. Reflection allows us to gain insight, foster personal growth, and enhance our understanding of the world around us. To aid you on this introspective journey, we have curated a thoughtful collection of 91 inspiring reflection quotes. These quotes, sourced from thinkers, authors, and leaders across the ages, serve as gentle reminders of the importance of looking inward and appreciating the nuances of life. Whether you are seeking motivation, clarity, or simply a fresh perspective, these quotes will inspire you to embrace the beauty and wisdom that self-reflection offers.

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

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

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

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

5. “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

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

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

8. “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

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

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

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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “Religion is, in reality, living. Our religion is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our religion is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think - all these things - twenty-four hours a day. One's religion, then, is ones life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived. Religion is not prayer, it is not a church, it is not theistic, it is not atheistic, it has little to do with what white people call "religion." It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our religion; if we experiment on living animals, that is our religion; if we cheat at cards, that is our religion; if we dream of being famous, that is our religion; if we gossip maliciously, that is our religion; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our religion. All that we do, and are, is our religion.” - Jack D. Forbes

15. “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

16. “The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?No, thank you,' he will think. 'Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.” - Viktor E. Frankl

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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

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

23. “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

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

25. “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

26. “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

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

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

29. “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.” - Henry David Thoreau

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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “has it ever occurred to you that where there is no anger, there is also no love?” - Siobhan Dowd

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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

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

43. “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

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

45. “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

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

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

48. “What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky.” - Victor Hugo

49. “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

50. “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

51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

56. “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

57. “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.” - R.D. Ronald

58. “I thought of all the hardships and people that I had lost in the past few days alone, but, most of all, I thought of how I didn't regret any of it.” - Shannon A Thompson

59. “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

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

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

62. “He had done nothing on Christmas day, just wandered around outside in the frozen woods. Hard ground, chill winds and bare branches that looked like they'd been dipped in sugar. None of it seemed real, like walking around in a desolate dream, but one he didn't want to wake up from.” - R.D. Ronald

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

68. “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

69. “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

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

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

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

73. “I had an uneventful few days," it told her. "The most exciting thing was an hour-long lecture from the headmaster on taking our studies seriously. He said next year's exam will arrive sooner than we think.""No, they won't," Valkyrie said, frowning. "They'll arrive next year, exactly when we expect them.""That's what I told him," the reflection nodded. "I don't think he's comfortable with logic, because he didn't look happy. He sent me to the Career Guidance counsellor, who asked me what I wanted to do after college."Valkyrie stowed her black clothes. "What did you say?""I told her I wanted to be a Career Guidance counsellor. She started crying, then accused me of mocking her. I told her if she wasn't happy in her job then she should look at other options, then pointed out that I was already doing her job better than she was. She gave me detention.” - Derek Landy

74. “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

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

76. “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

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

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

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

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

81. “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

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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

88. “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

89. “[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

90. “Such is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection. Such is the force of natural pity, which the most depraved mores still have difficulty destroying, since everyday one sees in our theaters someone affected and weeping at the ills of some unfortunate person, and who, were he in the tyrant's place, would intensify the torments of his enemy still more; [like the bloodthirsty Sulla, so sensitive to ills he had not caused, or like Alexander of Pherae, who did not dare attend the performance of any tragedy, for fear of being seen weeping with Andromache and Priam, and yet who listened impassively to the cries of so many citizens who were killed everyday on his orders. Nature, in giving men tears, bears witness that she gave the human race the softest hearts.] Mandeville has a clear awareness that, with all their mores, men would never have been anything but monsters, if nature had not given them pity to aid their reason; but he has not seen that from this quality alone flow all the social virtues that he wants to deny in men. In fact, what are generosity, mercy, and humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general. Benevolence and even friendship are, properly understood, the products of a constant pity fixed on a particular object; for is desiring that someone not suffer anything but desiring that he be happy?” - Jean Jacques Rousseau

91. “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