Mirror Of The World Quotes & Sayings

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that's what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That's where you are. You've got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet. — Joseph Campbell

I hate it [driving] more than anything in the whole world. I'm just an awful, awful driver. I get lost, I hit things (parked cars, one moving car, a pole in my parking garage). Just when I think I got everything under control, I'll miss seeing something out of the corner of my mirror. — Rachael Leigh Cook

Sensitive, responsive, eagerly welcomed everywhere, the drama, holding the mirror up to nature, by laughter and by tears reveals to mankind the world of men. — George Pierce Baker

Everybody is looking with his own world of desires, expectations, passions, lust, greed, anger. There are a thousand and one things standing between you and your world; that's why you don't ever see it as it is. Once your eye is completely clean, clean of all the dust, once it becomes a pure mirror, it reflects that which is. And that is truth and truth liberates, but it has to be your own. My truth cannot liberate you, Buddha's truth cannot liberate you. There is only one possibility of liberation, that is your own truth. And all that you have to do is to create a dispassionate eye. — Rajneesh

Strangers are never seen through a window. When our eyes are cast upon another, we are in fact gazing into the depths of a mirror. If you truly desire to understand how you feel about yourself, just take an honest look at how you view the world around you. — Carl Henegan

When you look through the window of hate, you are really looking in the Devil's mirror. — Jack Byrne

Whereas the Greeks had Zeus and Athena, we had people who still lived in Verdun. They had a lot to bear on their shoulders. They had to invent the whole world themselves. They were supposed to have supernatural powers and achieve sainthood. When really they just found themselves peering into the mirror above the bathroom sink, looking to see how they were aging. Sitting in the bathtub, smoking a cigarette, terrified of death like the rest of us. — Heather O'Neill

everything that is in the world, there is a correspondence on every level of existence. The macrocosm is a reflection of the microcosm, and the way we experience the outer world is a reflection of our inner state: it is our mirror. If we are in harmony with ourselves, then we will be in harmony with the outer world, i.e. God. If we change from within, then everything around us also changes. I certainly knew how true this was. — Kristiane Backer

The law of correspondence says your outer world is a mirror of your inner world. Your outer world corresponds to your inner world. Your outer world of your relationships - especially with your children and spouse - simply corresponds to how you feel about yourself, how you're doing — Brian Tracy

I love you. As the same value, as the same expression, with the same pride and the same meaning as I love my work, my mills, my Metal, my hours at a desk, at a furnace, in a laboratory, in an ore mine, as I love my ability to work, as I love the act of sight and knowledge, as I love the action of my mind when it solves a chemical equation or grasps a sunrise, as I love the things I've made and the things I've felt, as *my* product, as *my* choice, as a shape of my world, as my best mirror, as the wife I've never had, as that which makes all the rest of it possible: as my power to live. — Ayn Rand

If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflexion of its Creator. — John Henry Newman

The mirror had broken into millions of pieces and the wind blew them all over the world. If a person got a speck in their eye, the person would only see the ugly side of things from then on, but if a piece got in their blood and it reached their heart, it would freeze into a solid block of ice and they couldn't feel anything anymore — Isobelle Carmody

Why does a little girl lose her emotional equilibrium in a moment of parental discipline, or a megastar musician forget who she is because of one criticism? Or why, when a text message or the subject line of an e-mail says, "We need to talk" (or for us pastors, "About your sermon") are we struck with a sudden feeling of doom? Why do we spend hours in the gym or in front of the mirror or online meticulously editing our social media profiles? Why is the perfect "selfie" such a large part of how we present ourselves to the world? Why do we live in constant disequilibrium about what our real or imagined critics might say about us? — Scott Sauls

When I was little, my Aunt Bigeois told me "If you look at yourself too long in the mirror, you'll see a monkey." I must have looked at myself even longer than that: what I see is well below the monkey, on the fringe of the vegetable world, at the level of jellyfish... The eyes especially are horrible seen so close. They are glassy, soft, blind, red-rimmed, they look like fish scales... A silky white down covers the great slopes of the cheeks, two hairs protrude from the nostrils: it is a geological embossed map. And, in spite of everything, this lunar world is familiar to me. I cannot say I recognize the details. But the whole thing gives me an impression of something seen before which stupefies me. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The moon sets. The next day you wake up in sheets that smell of fabric conditioner. There is CNN. There is coffee. There is weather. There is your human face in the mirror. The world, you discover, is a place of appalling continuity. — Glen Duncan

Opening the door, he nearly did a double take into the mirror behind
him.
Hooch. Hooch, pushing his shades back up onto his head, and re-shouldering the bergan. Hooch, standing in the doorway.
"Been thinking."
Two words, more than usual.
"Been around a bit."
Six, speech worthy of a national holiday.
"Looking for a station now."
Eleven, whole fucking fireworks.
"Central station."
Thirteen, and the heavens came down for Matt.
"You still offering?"
Sixteen, and the world stopped spinning.
Matt stood thinking for a while, not a muscle in his face twitched. Then
stepped aside, gestured the other man to follow him. Closed the door.
"One condition."
Hooch's brows rose for a split second.
Matt broke into a grin at last, which threatened to split his face. "Promise
not to talk too much. — Marquesate

Failure is easy to measure. Failure is an event.Harder to measure is insignificance. A nonevent. Insignificance creeps, it dawns, it gives you hope, then delusion, then one day, when you're not looking, it's there, at your front door, on your desk, in the mirror, or not, not any of that, it's the lack of all that. One day, when you are looking, it's not looking, no one is. You lie in your bed and realize that if you don't get out of bed and into the world today, it is very likely no one will even notice. — Charles Yu

Recent events lead me to believe the world is like that, too
people are the individual fragments, but we are also part of the whole mirror. We are connected, not only to one another but also to the fabric of the universe. — Wendy Mass

We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly. — John Pilger

In the castle of Benwick, the French boy was looking at his face in the polished surface of a kettle-hat. It flashed in the sunlight with the stubborn gleam of metal. It was practically the same as the steel helmet which soldiers still wear, and it did not make a good mirror, but it was the best he could get. He turned the hat in various directions, hoping to get an average idea of his face from the different distoritons which the bulges made. He was trying to find out what he was, and he was afraid of what he would find.
The boy thought that there was something wrong with him. All through his life
even when he was a great man with the world at his feet
he was to feel this gap: something at the bototm of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand. There is no need for us to try to understand it. We do not have to dabble in a place which he preferred to keep secret. — T.H. White

As a mirror of our own inner division, we have fragmented the world into inner and outer experience. We embrace our separateness without realizing that there is only one reality. The universe is a single process occurring in consciousness ("the great stream"), and only by merging into that process can we discover who we really are. — Alan W. Watts

When you make peace with yourself, the world will mirror back that same level of peace. — Debbie Ford

Ove looks at himself in the reverse mirror. Wonders whether perhaps he should have put on a tie. She always liked it when he wore a tie. She looked at him then as the most handsome man in the world. He wonders if she will look at him now. If she'll be ashamed of him turning up in the afterlife unemployed and wearing a dirty suit. — Fredrik Backman

I have a very specific memory of watching 'Singing in the Rain,' and looking at myself in the mirror after watching it and perceiving myself as one of those people that I was just watching on T.V. It was just kind of a knowing that this would be the world that I would enter into. And that's what I did. — Kat Edmonson

Listen, twenty years ago, it wasn't so cool to have a calculator watch, right? And spending all day inside playing with your calculator watch sent a clear message that you weren't doing so well socially. And judgments like 'like' and 'dislike' and 'smiles' and 'frowns' were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and it would say, 'Do you like unicorns and stickers?' and you'd say, 'Yeah, I like unicorns and stickers! Smile!' That kind of thing. But now it's not just junior high kids who do it, it's everyone, and it seems to me sometimes I've entered some inverted zone, some mirror world where the dorkiest shit in the world is completely dominant. The world has dorkified itself. — Dave Eggers

Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you. — Milan Kundera

He'd know about the role of mirror neurons in the brain, special cells in the premotor cortex that fire right before a person reaches for a rock, steps forward, turns away, begins to smile.Amazingly, the same neurons fire whether we do something or watch someone else do the same thing, and both summon similar feelings. Learning form our own mishaps isn't as safe as learning from someone else's, which helps us decipher the world of intentions, making our social whirl possible. The brain evolved clever ways to spy or eavesdrop on risk, to fathom another's joy or pain quickly, as detailed sensations, without resorting to words. We feel what we see, we experience others as self. — Diane Ackerman

I think of sense, and of thoughts built on sense, as windows, not as prison bars. I think that we can, however imperfectly, mirror the world, like Leibnitz's monads; and I think it is the duty of the philosopher to make himself as undistorting a mirror as he can. But it is also his duty to recognize such distortions as are inevitable from our very nature. Of these, the most fundamental is that we view the world from the point of view of the here and now, not with that large impartiality which theists attribute to the Deity. To achieve such impartiality is impossible for us, but we can travel a certain distance towards it. To show the road to this end is the supreme duty of the philosopher. — Bertrand Russell

One of my many horrors is to become the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt and more too because the mirror in the hall has given up the ghost. A shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except in his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence. — Per Petterson

Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business
you have to dig out a little place that's only yours. — J. Courtney Sullivan

In our rapid and externalized world, language has become ghostlike, abbreviated to code and label. Words that would mirror the soul carry the loam of substance and the shadow of the divine. The sense of silence and darkness behind the words in more ancient cultures, particularly in folk culture, is absent in the modern use of language. Language is full of acronyms; nowadays we are impatient of words that carry with them histories and associations. — John O'Donohue

In all that you do, give the best of yourself so that your spirit is returned to you, and offer the best of yourself to each person so that they can return your love. You'll see that the world will become a magnifying mirror, reflecting back at you everything that you gave without self-interest, and more. Because the only way to surround yourself with smiles is to smile, and the only way to surround yourself with love is to give it to others. — A.G. Roemmers

It's scary when you enter the real world. It's like turning off the highway in the middle of nowhere. Maybe there's another road, or a dirt road, or nothing at all. But it's up to you to forge your own path. You can ask for advice, but ultimately, it's your road. And the good thing about this road is that it can go in any direction you want. You can turn left, turn right, turn around, get off the road completely onto another dirt road. All that freedom is scary, frankly. But eventually, you'll look in the rearview mirror and marvel at this amazing journey you built from nothing. Enjoy the journey. Enjoy the confusion. Enjoy making mistakes. That's how the best roads are built. — A.J. Truman

I stood before a mirror and said fearfully: "I want to see how I look in the mirror with my eyes closed."
These wrods of Richter's, when I first came upon them, made an indescribable commotion in me. As did the following, which seems almost like a corollary of the above - from Novalis:
The seat of the soul is where inner world and outer world touch each other. For nobody knows himself, if he is only himself and not also another one at the same time.
To take possession of one's transcendental I, to be the I of one's I, at the same time, as Novalis expressed it again. — Henry Miller

Good stitchery," Kelsea told him. "But it will scar anyway, won't it?"
The Fetch nodded. "I'm not God, nor am I the queen's surgeon." He gave her a mocking bow. "But it won't fester, and you can tell people that you took the wound in battle."
"Battle?"
"It was a battle getting all that armor off you, and I'll tell the world so."
Kelsea smiled, put down the mirror, and turned to him. — Erika Johansen

Demons are a very human creation. You look for ways to explain evil, and instead of seeing it in yourselves, you offload the responsibility onto monsters. The monstrous exists in the mirror, not in the sulfurous depths of some fantasy world. — Kelley Armstrong

Whoever sees Christ as a mirror of the Father's heart, actually walks through the world with new eyes. — Martin Luther

You are a creature meant to be free. Almost always, the person hardest to tell the truth to ... is you. Once you can be honest with yourself, you'll find the strength and desire to be honest with others. It's the most freeing feeling imaginable. Go find a mirror and face yourself and your darkest truths. You have the light within you to chase away the dark demons that hold you down and push you back into the black corners of your past. You deserve better. You are a child of light and light hidden behind dark clouds, does nothing to brighten the world. — Toni Sorenson

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books. — Rudine Sims Bishop

ghost. No way am I gonna get bullied by anyone or anything - especially ghosts. "Mattie, you okay?" Mrs. Olson is eyeballing me with concern. I haven't moved to get out of the car. "All good, Mrs. O," I smile weakly at her. "Just tired." Taking a deep breath, I open the door and force myself out. I am not afraid, I chant over and over. The other kids are still at school, so the house is pretty empty. Mrs. O had told me earlier we had a new foster kid in the house, but I'm betting he's at school too. She sends me upstairs with the promise to bring me a sandwich and a glass of milk. The doctors said no caffeine for a while, so my favorite drink in the world, Coke, is off limits. At least until I can escape and get to a gas station. I need it like an addict needs crack. My room is exactly as I left it, the bed turned down and my clothes thrown into a corner. A simple white dresser and mirror, desk, and a twin bed covered in my worn out quilt decorate the room. — Apryl Baker

Classical design is a mirror of the human mind. It's how we see the world. — Robert McKee

Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history. — Andrea Dworkin

The world is a mirror of ourselves. — Deyth Banger

We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living
Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world,
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh. — W.B.Yeats

Understanding of the self only arises in relationship, in watching yourself in relationship to people, ideas, and things; to trees, the earth, and the world around you and within you. Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed. Without self-knowledge there is no basis for right thought and action. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation. — Rabindranath Tagore

It seemed just as clear to me that I would never pick up a pen again, fill a page with writing. The profession seemed too onerous, a perpetual mirror of our unredeemed existence, which I was also so loath to accept and endure. Over and over again to meet the morning hour anew, the day, the ever-estranged world, to touch them and wring one word from your stricken heart - and know this: this will not last, this is the moment of parting, already forgotten. But, still exhausted and blinded by pain, you must set off again, and who will make it worth your while? Is it worth the effort? — Annemarie Schwarzenbach

I never dreamed of being Shakespeare or Goethe, and I never expected to hold the great mirror of truth up before the world; I dreamed only of being a little pocket mirror, the sort that a woman can carry in her purse; one that reflects small blemishes, and some great beauties, when held close enough to the heart. — Peter Altenberg

But I came to see that Las Vegas is not a freak but is, instead, deeply integrated with the rest of the country, and the world beyond. It is symptom, mirror, metaphor. — Timothy O'Grady

Debates about the imagination and its role in human knowledge go back in the West to ancient Greece around the secrets and enigmas of the revealed "symbol" and its relationship to the more plodding ways of reason and rational knowledge. The most recent chapter of that larger conversation goes back to the eighteenth century and what we now call the Romantic movement. The poets and philosophers of the latter asked: What is the imagination? Is it simply a spinner of fantasies? Or can it also become a "window" of revealed truths from some other deeper part of the soul or world? Or, better yet, like some secret two-way mirror in a modern-day police station, is the imagination both, depending on whether one is looking at or through its reflecting surface, that is, depending on which side of it one is standing? Can one stand on both sides? — Whitley Strieber

The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense
it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right, nor do Two Rights Make a Left.

Which ever side you think is Correct. Great. That is what resonates with your perception... Dive deep within yourself to discover why you think you need to judge or change the person in your perception.. when the real change is the reflection in the mirror..reflected by the person you are trying to change... out of fear. Fear is the negative energies keeping you from the light of truth.

Be Yourself and Honor others for who they are. If we were all the same.. the world wouldn't have so many pretty colors and changes. — Jonathan Bailey

As long as I'm between home and the clinic I do all right. But out in the real world, I feel like prey. I slink around and can feel people looking at me. I feel their eyes boring into me. I feel what they're thinking: Watch her, she could go off anytime. But within the walls of my farmhouse, I climb out of the protective shell, my arms slowly rise like a phoenix, and I dance, wail, fly around the room and then collapse, crying, in front of my mirrors. I start to see in the mirror what it is I really look like, instead of what I was trained from the womb to see. I do not write about it. I do not talk about it. I do not know what I am doing. But just like a baby bird, I am blinking once-sealed eyes and unfolding damp wings. I cannot articulate the past. A part of me knows it's there, lurking, just behind what I can acknowledge, but it is not within sight. And I am keeping it that way. — Julie Gregory

Others dreamed of finding a person in the world whose soul was made in their mirror image, but Almondine and Edgar had been conceived nearly together, grown up together, and however strange it might be, she was his other. Much could be endured for that. — David Wroblewski

It is a turn of events that highlights a certain human arrogance about our destructive powers. It is only hubris to imagine that we can destroy nature, or the world. It is the mirror image of the industrialist's egotistical desire to exploit and control it. And it is true that we can kill off continents of forest and destroy species by the thousands, and even wreak climate change. But once we're gone, the rest of nature will rush on, as it has after so many other cataclysms, growing over and through and out of us. The apocalypse we can create is for ourselves and for our cousins, but not for life on Earth. — Andrew Blackwell

The world that spun from the web of her imagination was manifestly more real to [Patricia Highsmith] than what she saw before her. It was as if, like her fiction, she inhabited a paraxial region, and area which, like one of the working titles for Strangers on a Train, could be said to lie at 'The Other Side of the Mirror'. — Andrew Wilson

Throughout these lectures I have delighted in showing you that the price of gaining such an accurate theory has been the erosion of our common sense. We must accept some very bizarre behavior: the amplification and suppression of probabilities, light reflecting from all parts of a mirror, light travelling in paths other than a straight line, photons going faster or slower than the conventional speed of light, electrons going backwards in time, photons suddenly disintegrating into a positron-electron pair, and so on. That we must do, in order to appreciate what Nature is really doing underneath nearly all the phenomena we see in the world. — Richard Feynman

Don't misunderstand me. The terrorist actions of Al-Qaeda were and are unmitigatedly evil. But the astonishing naivety which decreed that America as a whole was a pure, innocent victim, so that the world could be neatly divided up into evil people (particularly Arabs) and good people (particularly Americans and Israelis), and that the latter had a responsibility now to punish the former, is a large-scale example of what I'm talking about - just as it is immature and naive to suggest the mirror image of this view, namely that the western world is guilty in all respects and that all protestors and terrorists are therefore completely justified in what they do. In the same way, to suggest that all who possess guns should be locked up, or (the American mirror-image of this view) that everyone should carry guns so that good people can shoot bad ones before they can get up to their tricks, is simply a failure to think into the depths of what's going on. — N. T. Wright

The thing that's hard about it - the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance - is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now - the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong. — Dexter Palmer

No one could see her out here, no one could judge her. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw the animal that she was trapped inside, that grew and fed and wanted. She wished above all else to look ordinary so that people's eyes just slid over her. Because Mum was wrong. It wasn't about believing this or that, it wasn't about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world. Clouds scrolled high up. She couldn't get Melissa out of her head. Something magnetic about her, the possibility of a softness inside, the challenge of peeling back those layers. — Mark Haddon

No," he said after a pause, "the true art of the gods is the comic. The comic is a condescension of the divine to the world of man; it is the sublime vision, which cannot be studied, but must ever be celestially granted. In the comic the gods see their own being reflected as in a mirror, and while the tragic poet is bound by strict laws, they will allow the comic artist a freedom as unlimited as their own. They do not even withhold their own existence from his sports. Jove may favor Lucianos of Samosata. As long as your mockery is in true godly taste you may mock at the gods and still remain a sound devotee. But in pitying, or condoling with your god, you deny and annihilate him, and such is the most horrible of atheisms. — Karen Blixen

The Bible is the light of my understanding, the joy of my heart, the fullness of my hope, the clarified of my affections, the mirror of my thoughts, the consoler of my sorrows, the guide of my soul through this gloomy labyrinth of time, the telescope went from heaven to reveal to the eye of man the amazing glories of the far distant world. — William Jones

The Mirror Empire is the most original fantasy I've read in a long time, set in a world full of new ideas, expanding the horizons of the genre. A complex and intricate book full of elegant ideas and finely-drawn characters. — Adrian Tchaikovsky

Universe is an empty mirror. World is just the reflection of your thoughts. — Amit Ray

In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe. — Muriel Barbery

There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been "black," and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separated the "white" from the "black," even if it meant that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash. The result is a people, black people, who embody all physical varieties and whose life stories mirror this physical range. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Every particle of the world is a mirror. In each atom blazes forth the light of a thousand suns. Open the heart of a raindrop and you will find a hundred oceans. In a grain of sand lies the seed of a thousand beings. — Mahmud Shabistari

Fully revealed, the green eyes pierced her heart. In them, she sensed pain, loneliness and despair. Yet they weren't seeing her. Focused on the movement of the blade, the mesmerizing gaze seemed a world away. Stroke after stroke, the unmasked face appeared in the mirror. — Chris Lange

Of course you have a duty to show the disfigurations of society as well as its more agreeable aspects. But if TV in the western world uses its freedom continually to show all that is worst in our society, while the centrally controlled television of the Communist world and the dictatorships show only what is judged advantageous to them and suppress everything else, how are the uncommitted to judge between us? How can they fail to misjudge if they view matters only through a distorted mirror? — Margaret Thatcher

Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first words which arouse within him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of his prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak, comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Another page turns on the calendar, April now, not March.
...
I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world ... I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.
I wanted to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness ... Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help.
I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.
There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.
I am thawing. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Welcome to the real world of marriage, where hairs are always on the sink and little white spots cover the mirror, where arguments center on which way the toilet paper comes off and whether the lid should be up or down. It is a world where shoes do not walk to the closet and drawers do not close themselves, where coats do not like hangers and socks go AWOL during laundry. In this world, a look can hurt and a word can crush. Intimate lovers can become enemies, and marriage a battlefield. — Gary Chapman

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do. — Mahatma Gandhi

Look at me
I am the life in a wasteland
Look at me
I am the slavery through the ages
Look at me
I am the mirror of the world
Look at me
I am the illusion I've fought for
Look at me
I'm still loving you
and I keep being here
for you, for me,
and for what's worth breathing — Rixa White

As far as evil goes" - she shrugged one shoulder - "I've spent a dozen years studying the subject and there's one thing I know for sure." Her expression grew distant, breakable somehow. She blinked and seemed to push whatever had distracted her aside. "If you want to know what evil looks like, look in the mirror." She leaned down, flattened her hands on the table once more, and went face-to-face with Wells. "Any one of us is capable of evil, Detective. We all have a line. It's not crossing it that separates us from the Ed Geins and Charles Mansons of the world. — Debra Webb

Know the world from end to end is a mirror;
in each atom a hundred suns are concealed.
If you pierce the heart of a single drop of water,
from it will flow a hundred clear oceans;
if you look intently at each speck of dust,
in it you will see a thousand beings.
A gnat in its limbs is like an elephant;
in name a drop of water resembles the Nile.
In the heart of a barleycorn is stored a hundred harvests.
Within a millet-seed a world exists.
In an insects wing is an ocean of life.
A heaven is concealed in the pupil of an eye.
The core at the center of the heart is small,
yet the Lord of both worlds will enter there. — Mahmud Shabistari

Life in Christ is not meant to mirror life in a Greco-Roman culture. An ancient Middle Eastern culture is not our standard. We are not meant to adopt the world of Luther's Reformation or the culture of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening or even 1950s America as our standard for righteousness. The culture, past or present, isn't the point: Jesus and his Kingdom come, his will done, right now - that is the point. — Sarah Bessey

Cinema is the greatest mirror of humanity's struggle. You see this alternative world, but you're part of it. Everybody is part of it. This is our world. — Lav Diaz

For the future world-trading regime to mirror economic reality and to allow the use of modern business strategies, we need a single overarching multilateral framework for trade. We can have either a flat world or a patchwork of crisscrossing mountain ranges and tunnels. — Victor Fung

What is style but a form of silent speech? When I put together an outfit to wear, I am putting together chapters of a story that needs to tell itself to the world in merely a minute! When I choose an outfit to wear, I am choosing a speech, a certain flow of mind-to-skin that is important to be understood. Style is the sentiment that I make without needing to speak to anyone and it's also an internal conversation that I make with myself throughout the day, I share those intimate words every time I look into the mirror or every time I look at my photographs. — C. JoyBell C.

All writers write about themselves, just as the old storytellers chose to tell stories that spoke to and about themselves. They call it the world, but it is themselves they portray. The world of which they write is like a mirror that reflects the inside of their hearts, often more truly than they know. — Jane Yolen

Expressed itself not only in politics, but also in art, romance, chivalry, and war. It expressed itself very little in the intellectual world, because education was almost wholly confined to the clergy. The explicit philosophy of the Middle Ages is not an accurate mirror of the times, but only of what was thought by one party. Among ecclesiastics, however
especially among the Franciscan friars
a certain — Bertrand Russell

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.
By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well
into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me. — Elizabeth Bishop

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. "One's friends," George Santayana wrote, "are that part of the human race with which one can be human. — Joan D. Chittister

My old geography professor once told his class how the music, paintings, sculptures, and books of the world are mirror in which people see versions of themselves. — Simon Van Booy

On the other side of that big-ass mirror, a video camera was watching us. In about ten seconds, it was going to start spitting static at itself, and everything it saw was going to break up into a fuzzy, gray-white wash, rolling up and down, that wouldn't be admissible as evidence on Judge Judy. Those missing frames would last a little less than a quarter of a minute, consolidate themselves back
into a semblance of reality, and then I would theoretically go walking right back out of here.
Between now and that moment, there stretched an infinite ocean of potential
time. Time enough to walk around the world. Time enough to fall in love, get
married on a white beach under purple stars, write a book of poems about
truest passion, have a few good and bloody screaming matches, get divorced in a court of autumn elves and gypsy moths, then set the ink-stained, tear-streaked pages of your text ablaze. — Clinton Boomer

the world is the mirror of myself dying. — Henry Miller

I've taped a list to my bathroom mirror. It's my Most Violated List ... Anger. I gave the finger to an ATM. You see, the ATM charged me a $1.75 fee for withdrawl. A dollar seventy-five? That's bananas. So I flipped off the screen. As Julie tells me, when you start making rude gestures to inanimate objects, it's time to work on your anger issues. Mine is not the shouting, pulsing-vein-in-the forehead rage. Like my dad, I rarely raise my voice. My anger problem is more one of long-lasting resentment. It's a heap of real or perceived slights that eventually build up into a mountain of bitterness ... get some perspective ... I ask myself the question God asked Jonah. 'Do you do well to be angry?' ... The world will not end ... Mute your petty resentment. — A. J. Jacobs

The mirror it was and life it spelled,
The road ahead, and the time past stepped,
All gathered in one; one to all paired,
My life is so different from all the world's threads.

My breaths are mine, my woes are too,
If my life were put through you,
You sure would unlikely pursue,
It should be left for me to gather,
I am its sculptor, mine would be the hammer. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Because I hated myself so much for my fatness, I always looked for other fat people, and especially for fatter people, to judge as harshly as the world seemed to be judging me. And you know what? There was always someone fatter who was more disgusting than I was, more not with it, and more lazy. It helped me validate myself as mis-seen, misunderstood, and misevaluated. It also helped me find some sort of weird self-esteem that I never could find when looking at myself in the mirror. — Dan Pearce

My world stops at the sight of her ... it's as if I've been looking at Chloe through a two-way mirror this entire time - aware of her, always feeling her presence, but never allowing myself to break through the barrier. — K.K. Allen

You are the most powerful army in the world; you are the future of this planet. You cannot, you will not spend one more minute of your time looking in a mirror wishing you looked different. — Jamie Le Fay

Thrillers provide the reader with a safe escape into a dangerous world where the stakes are as high as can be imagined with unpredictable outcomes. It's a perfect genre in which to explore hard issues of good and evil, a mirror that allows the reader to see both the good and not so good in themselves. — Ted Dekker

I wonder
from these thousand of "me's",
which one am I?
Listen to my cry, do not drown my voice
I am completely filled with the thought of you.
Don't lay broken glass on my path
I will crush it into dust.
I am nothing, just a mirror in the palm of your hand,
reflecting your kindness, your sadness, your anger.
If you were a blade of grass or a tiny flower
I will pitch my tent in your shadow.
Only your presence revives my withered heart.
You are the candle that lights the whole world
and I am an empty vessel for your light.
Rumi - "Hidden Music — Rumi

Folk music is the original melody of man; it is the musical mirror of the world. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself ... I was was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger - I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror?
...
The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection?
In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon. — Kevin Kelly

It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient. — Neil Gaiman

There's one problem with all psychological knowledge - nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses, children. But they have no insight into themselves at all. The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves. Psychological knowledge doesn't work if you look in a mirror. This bizarre fact is, as far as I know, unexplained. — Michael Crichton

When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight; and so you make a mirror, thinking that it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but then you understand that the mirror reflects only appearances, and that reality is somewhere else, off behind the mirror; and then you remember that behind the mirror there is only the chaos. — John Banville