Quotes & Sayings About Reflection And Life

BREATHE
Mindful breathing is a basic wonderful pleasure for life. Breathing calms our body and mind to unify our soul within the present moment. Breathing is a supreme gift from Mother Nature, giving universal pranic energy which one guides within.

BELIEVE
Intentions, wishes and dreams can come true. Not necessarily all at once, but herein lies the splendour of life's journey. The secret tonic to success is belief and imagination, blended with confidence to open your heart and follow your dreams.

BE
Savadhyaya is the practice of inward reflection, honest self-observation and learning. Whatever you do, wherever you are, find contentment and simply be there, because that's exactly where you need to be. — Eva

Each person is chargeable with the essential task to make his or her thought processes as refined as possible. Every person must declare what important distinctions will allow him or her to live a vivid and reflection filled life. — Kilroy J. Oldster

You can't imagine fame. You can only ever see it from an outsider and comment on it with the rueful wisdom of a non participant. When it happens to you, it doesn't matter what age or how, it is a very steep learning curve. The imprtanot thing to realize in all of it is that life is short, to protect the ones you love, and not expose yourself to too much abuse or narcissistic reflection gazing and move on. If fame affords me the type of ability to do the kind of work I'm being offered, who am I to complain about the downsides. It's all relative. And this are obviously very high class problems. The way privacy becomes an every shrinking island is inevitable but also manageable and it doesn't necessary have to get that way ... — Benedict Cumberbatch

Reading is a dialog with oneself; it is self-reflection, which cultivates profound humanity. Reading is therefore essential to our development. It expands and enriches the personality like a seed that germinates after a long time and sends forth many blossom-laden branches.
People who can say of a book, 'this changed my life' truly understand the meaning of happiness. Reading that sparks inner revolution is desperately needed to escape drowning in the rapidly advancing information society. Reading is more than intellectual ornamentation; it is a battle for the establishment for the self, a ceaseless challenge that keeps us young and vigorous. — Daisaku Ikeda

Silence is a time of reflection to bring peace and meaning to your life, and to those around you. This deafening quiescence will mean different things to different people but if they listen carefully, they will understand... — Virginia Alison

Loneliness

It's Hell for us to draw the fetters
Of life in alienation, stiff.
All people prefer to share gladness,
And nobody - to share grief.

As a king of air, I'm lone here,
The pain lives in my heart, so grim,
And I can see that, to the fear
Of fate, years pass me by like dreams;

And comes again with, touched by gold,
The same dream, gloomy one and old.
I see a coffin, black and sole,
It waits: why to detain the world?

There will be not a sad reflection,
There will be (I am betting on)
Much more gaily celebration
When I am dead, than - born. — Mikhail Lermontov

The inviolability of the person which is a reflection of the absolute inviolability of God, finds its primary and fundamental expression in the inviolability of human life. Above all, the common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights-for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture- is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination. — Pope John Paul II

He needed the people and the clamour around him. There was no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a single solvent-admiration; there was no room for anything else. He was great; great as the number of people who told him so. He was right; right as the number of people who believed it. He looked at the faces, at the eyes, he saw himself born in them, he saw himself granted the gift of life. That was Peter Keating, that, the reflection in those staring pupils, and his body was only it's reflection. — Ayn Rand

This is all I ever wanted - to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it. — Joseph Campbell

I believe that everything has a purpose and that everything a person does will come back to haunt or save him. Life is like a mirror in which everything we do is reflected back to us. We might not be able to recognize the reflection, and at times the image may be hidden. We may take years to see it or it may not even be visible during our lifetime. But it all comes around in the end. Space is as infinite as our actions are timeless. We are all part of the same invisible story, all travelling in a single continuum. — Lorenzo Quinn

Every person interprets the silence that surrounds him or her. The eternal silence of the universe that we exist in is terrifying because it forces each of to ask what our purpose is, why are we here, and what should I do? — Kilroy J. Oldster

Don't let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you. Don't fill your mind with all the bad things that might still happen. Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself why it's so unbearable and can't be survived." - MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 8.36 — Ryan Holiday

But for a long time, and probably far too long, I had a secret wish: the adolescently romantic idea that there was someone out there for me; someone I hadn't met yet who would ask me on a date and make sense of my life. I harbored the hope, I'm now embarrassed to admit, that like a girl in a Lifetime movie, I would look into someone's eyes and find a reflection of my inner life. But sometime between my teenage years and the first years in New York, that idea had pretty well evaporated. I'd grown up. — Diane Meier

The moon is the reflection of your heart and moonlight is the twinkle of your love. — Debasish Mridha

Aloneness exaggerates our emotions and sensitivity. — Beth Moore

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

Sorcha took the elevator down to the basement of the fashion house. She glanced at her stunningly beautiful reflection in the mirror and smiled to herself. How fortunate she was to be a vampire - no gray hairs, no wrinkles, no broken nails, no weight problems, and no PMT. What bliss! And how fortunate it was that all the legends about vampires were not true. She could not imagine an existence where she could not see and admire her own likeness - such a life to her would be intolerable and tedious. How could any female, even a vampire, survive without being able to see their own reflection? How could they do their hair and makeup? The very idea was totally preposterous. — Alan Kinross

It is not given to us to grasp the truth, which is identical with the divine, directly. We perceive it only in reflection, in example and symbol, in singular and related appearances. It meets us as a kind of life which is incomprehensible to us, and yet we cannot free ourselves from the desire to comprehend it. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

My eyes were covered and closed: eddying darkness seemed to swim around me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow. Self-abandoned, relaxed, and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried up bed of a great river: I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, and felt the torrent come: to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. I lay faint longing to be dead. One idea only still throbbed life like within me- a remembrance of God: it be got an unuttered prayer: these words went wandering up and down in my rayless mind, as something that should be whispered, but no energy found to express them — Charlotte Bronte

I have done very little besides sending away some of the large looking-glasses from my dressing-room, which was your father's. A very good man, and very much the gentleman I am sure: but I should think, Miss Elliot," (looking with serious reflection), "I should think he must be rather a dressy man for his time of life. Such a number of looking-glasses! oh Lord! there was no getting away from one's self. So I got Sophy to lend me a hand, and we soon shifted their quarters; and now I am quite snug, with my little shaving glass in one corner, and another great thing that I never go near. — Jane Austen

Any cyclist will tell you that one of the things they value most about cycling is what it does for their heads. It cleans out the clutter. Cycling allows for reflection. It simultaneously offers time to mull over problems and to escape those problems. It's both meditative and contemplative. Whether you're weaving through traffic or climbing a long country road, the effect is the same. Your body's working, and your mind is working. And when those two things start working in concert, other aspects of life can start falling into place too. — BikeSnobNYC

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it. — Marcel Proust

There is nothing "still" in the remarkably visceral poems of Alexander Long's third collection, Still Life, and nothing is at rest in these restless and edgy poems. Conversational and kinetic, these poems chart the traces left by the shifting overlays of the templates of literature, rock-and-roll, and contemporary culture. As each poem in Still Life attempts to fix a focus upon a scene or subject, the protean natures under view draw the poet into the eddies and complexities of reflection. This is a powerful and moving collection of poems. — David St. John

[E]very human life is a reflection of divinity, and ... every act of injustice mars and defaces the image of God in man. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Art is an imagination, projection, and reflection of the mind in a particular form that society can internalize and enjoy. — Debasish Mridha

Our reflection of action occurs in different contexts which may influence us to shape our accounts in different ways for different audiences - our colleagues, supervisor, trainers or examiners. Wwe story our lives in ways that give human meaning and purpose to our endeavors, and these stories in turn shape and guide our future actions. — Jacqui Stedmon

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

Through reflection, awakening, and choice we are able to exist as our true selves. However, this is not the end. In order for us to realize and put into practice the life purpose we have chosen, endless choices await us. — Ilchi Lee

Lascelles threw himself into the carriage, snorting with laughter and saying that he had never in his life heard of anything so ridiculous and comparing their snug drive through the London streets in Mr. Norrell's carriage to ancient French and Italian fables where fools set sail in milk-pails to fetch the moon's reflection from the bottom of a duckpond ... — Susanna Clarke

I have always been aware that human life is dream-like because most human beings exist passively. Their consciousness is little more than a reflection of their environment. In the sexual orgasm, the voltage power of their minds surges, and they become momentarily aware that they are not forty-watt bulbs, but two hundred and fifty, five hundred, a thousand ... Then the voltage drops, and they sink back to forty watts without a protest. They are like empty-headed fools who cannot remember anything for more than a few seconds. Human beings are so mediocre that they can scarcely be said to possess minds in any real sense. In a flash, I understood the absurd and obvious truth: nothing is worth possessing except intensity of consciousness. This is the truth we glimpse in the orgasm. — Colin Wilson

Nothing happens in the brain, except the gradual rust and detrition of the cells. But in the mind, worlds unclassified, undenominated, unassimilated, form, break, unite, dissolve, and harmonize ceaselessly. In the mind-world ideas are the indestructible elements which form the jeweled constellations of the interior life. We move within their orbits freely if we follow their intricate patterns, enslaved or possessed if we try to subjugate them. Everything external is but a reflection projected by the mind machine. — Henry Miller

I am not talking about rebelliousness, but giving people time for constructive internal reflection and even daydreaming. A lot of research is suggesting that the more that you demand people's external attention, the less chance you are allowing them to dip into the default mode where daydreams and reflection happen - and lot of great ideas are not going to come from the brute force of work but from personal life experience. Mind-wandering seems to be essential to the creative process, and I don't think a lot of businesses are aware of that fact. — Scott Barry Kaufman

What we are, we see the reflection in others. — Avijeet Das

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. — George Meredith

Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life's fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust's opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe's own impeachment of Kant and Hegel . Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking. — John Carroll

And that was is. Life sometimes flips on you like that. One minute you're looking at your reflection in the water, not entirely sure you like what you see, and the next minute you are upside down, submerged in a world where even familiar things look new. — Vicki Pettersson

Our life is a reflection of what we believe we deserve. As we deepen our acceptance of and open ourselves to the Infinite love of the universe, a new power flows through us, releasing us from the bondage of our old way of life. — Shakti Gawain

Your life is a reflection of how effectively you balance potential and kinetic energy. — Steve Maraboli

No regrets doesn't mean living with courage, it means living without reflection. To live without regret is to believe you have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with your life. (P.211) — Brene Brown

To persevere is always a reflection of the state of one's inner life, one's philosophy and one's perspective — David Guterson

You have to appreciate life before you want to preserve it," she said.
"And it's the survivors who maintain the most light and poignant hold upon the beauties of living. Women know this more often than men because birth is the reflection of death. — Frank Herbert

Your life plays out as a reflection of your genetic makeup and potentiality as expressed through your environment and choices. Love yourself enough to create an environment in your life that is conducive to the nourishment of your personal growth. Allow yourself to let go of the people, thoughts, and situations that poison your well-being. Cultivate a vibrant surrounding and commit yourself to making choices that will help you release the greatest expression of your unique beauty and purpose. — Steve Maraboli

I take a lot of inspiration from the nature of the universe and visualize my work as a direct or indirect reflection of life, inside and around us. — Jeet Aulakh

Keep your heart and mind open, Taylor. Don't make any rash decisions that you might regret later on. Sometimes things in life aren't as clear as we would like them to be, especially in the beginning. When the time is right, you'll know it. Just don't burn the bridge before you ever get the chance to cross it. — Rose Wynters

Most true happiness comes from one's inner life, from the disposition of the mind and soul. Admittedly, a good inner life is difficult to achieve, especially in these trying times. It takes reflection and contemplation and self-discipline. — William L. Shirer

What you think of about a nation or a situation is your self-expression and mind's reflection. — Debasish Mridha

I look around the room and can't help but think about how it is the little things we look back on in life. I wonder how often people think that they should pay more attention to them. — Erika Lance

If we confine ourselves to a general and distant reflection on the ills of human life, that can have no effect to prepare us for them. If by close and intense meditation we render them present and intimate to us, that is the true secret for poisoning all our pleasures, and rendering us perpetually miserable. — David Hume

Your life right now is a reflection of your past thoughts. That includes all the great things, and all the things you consider not so great. Since you attract to you what you think about most, it is easy to see what your dominant thoughts have been on every subject of your life, because that is what you have experienced. Until now! — Rhonda Byrne

Self-development requires direct action. Knowledge must precede action. The self's relation to the world must be grounded in reality through ideas and thoughts. Self-reflection and introspection expands our appreciation of life. — Kilroy J. Oldster

She said, "Your approach is wrong. You're writing an essay rather than creating a literary figure. What a literary character does in ten minutes might be a reflection of ten years' experience. You can't be limited to the plot of a novel - you've got to imagine her entire life, and what actually gets put into words is just the tip of the iceberg." So — Liu Cixin

You are unique. You are the only one in all of God's creation with your set of fingerprints--and your set of pain and experiences. You are special, and you are rare. The way the people in your life have treated you is absolutely no reflection of your value. It is only a reflection of their own pain and misery.

Remember, it doesn't matter where you've been--only where you're going. Because life isn't what you get--it's what you give!! — Darlene Ballard

Usually, when the distractions of daily life deplete our energy, the first thing we eliminate is the thing we eliminate is the thing we need the most: quiet, reflective time. Time to dream, time to contemplate what's working and what's not, so that we can make changes for the better. (January 17) — Sarah Ban Breathnach

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic. — Dennis Lehane

I am here just to honor your beauty, love, and life. We are the reflection of each other. We are one. — Debasish Mridha

From every book invisible threads reach out to other books; and as the mind comes to use and control those threads the whole panorama of the world's life, past and present, becomes constantly more varied and interesting, while at the same time the mind's own powers of reflection and judgment are exercised and strengthened. — Helen E. Haines

[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

The connections that we have with others, the things we learn, and yes, our prayers - all of it is a web of connections that bind us into the fabric of reality and make us part of something greater than ourselves. And if our reality is only a tiny reflection of a much greater reality, still it is also an essential part. And the same is true of each individual life. Each deed and thought - each word between friends - adds a new thread to a tapestry so vast that we may never be able to step back and see the whole. — Yael Shahar

I did it, and it's all right. Even the worst experiences were right in their time, because otherwise, it wouldn't have come to this point. That was your road, and you had to walk it. — Michael "Bommi" Baumann

Pay attention to what you pray for. Your prayers are not just a reflection of your desires and hopes; they are a guide for personal behavior. PRAY it, BE it, and you will SEE it. — Steve Maraboli

The moon is very charming, alluring, attracting and magical, not because of its beauty, but because of its illusion and reflection of change. — Debasish Mridha

Because of this false idea, they devised an aesthetic belief in making the exterior of an object a reflection of the practical functions of the interior and of the constructive idea. Yet these analyses of utility and necessity that, according to their beliefs, should be the basis for the construction of any object created by humanity become immediately absurd once we analyze all the object being manufactured today. A fork or a bed cannot come to be considered necessary for humanity's life and health, and yet retain a relative value.
They are 'learned necessities.' Modern human beings are suffocating under necessities like televisions, refrigerators, etc. And in the process making it impossible to live their real lives. Obviously we are not against modern technology, but we are against any notion of the absolute necessity of objects, to the point even of doubting their real utility.'
Asger Jorn — Tom McDonough

If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils
within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of
peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I
say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of
ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is
only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room
which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a
mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy
of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to
follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark
power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection
of ourselves. — E.T.A. Hoffmann

Where you are no is the reflection of your lifelong thoughts and actions. — Debasish Mridha

It was a moment before she replied. And in that moment, she realized that what was gone from her was the child in her, she'd crossed a brink from which there was no turning back. Whoever she had been, she was not anymore. And her life, for better or worse, would never again be what it had. — Allan Folsom

Sexual living is a reflection of God's love for us. It has two key qualities, which is faithfulness and creativity of new life. — Vincent Nichols

Social systems are neither a consumer product that we can buy or rent from the market nor a material that we can import from another country. It is not a creation of the almighty gifted from the heavens. A social system is a creation of mankind. That is a reflection of our responsibilities. In other words, the social system is the result of our behavior and the decisions we take in our way of life. — Nilantha Ilangamuwa

It was as if life elsewhere was a reflection through a dusty glass, and this was the real deal. — Chrystalla Thoma

There are places in the world where real life is still happening, far away from here, in a pre-Hitler Europe, where hundreds of lights are lit every evening, ladies and gentlemen gather to drink coffee with cream in oak-panelled rooms, or sit comfortably in splendid coffee-houses under gilt chandeliers, stroll arm in arm to the opera or the ballet, observe from close-up the lives of great artists, passionate love affairs, broken hearts, the painter's girlfriend falling in love with his best friend the composer, and going out at midnight bareheaded in the rain to stand alone on the ancient bridge whose reflection trembles in the river. * — Amos Oz

Surround yourself with those who won't compete but will revel in you your success and see your ascent as a reflection of their own possibilities. — Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Almost universally, when people look back on their lives while on their deathbed [ ... ] they wish they had spent more time with the people and activities they truly loved and less time worrying about aspects of life that, upon deeper examination, really don't matter at all that much. Imagining yourself at your own funeral allows you to look back at your life while you still have the chance to make some important changes. — Richard Carlson

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

Remember what you do in life is merely a reflection of who you are as a Christian, one who loves and serves the Lord. — Rachel Hauck

It is not a matter of life and death. It is not that important. But it is a reflection of life, and so the game is an enigma wrapped in a mystery impaled on a conundrum. — Peter Alliss

Prayer does not blind us to the world, but it transforms our vision of the world, and makes us see it, all men, and all the history of mankind, in the light of God. To pray 'in spirit and in truth' enables us to enter into contact with that infinite love, that inscrutable freedom which is at work behind the complexities and the intricacies of human existence. This does not mean fabricating for ourselves pious rationalizations to explain everything that happens. It involves no surreptitious manipulation of the hard truths of life. — Thomas Merton

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

The secret to staying atop your priorities is to schooled regular times for review and reflection. — Michael Hyatt

Looking back, I have come to realize that the gang lifestyle back then - the fame, the respect, and the recognition - was stronger and powerful than any drug. We were serious with what we were dealing with. It was like a do or die situation. Shelton 'Apples' Burrows reform gang leader — Drexel Deal

Reflection brakes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment. — William Hazlitt

I don't believe the idea of Fate is that everything in our lives is predetermined. For me, it's those moments when, on reflection, Life seems to have intervened and given us a friendly or not-so-friendly nudge in another direction. — Thea Euryphaessa

Dharma practice is founded on resolve. This is not an emotional conversion, a devastating realization of the error of our ways, a desperate urge to be good, but an ongoing, heartfelt reflection on priorities, values, and purpose. We need to keep taking stock of our life in an unsentimental, uncompromising way. — Stephen Batchelor

When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all. — Joseph Campbell

It's like living your whole life without ever looking in a mirror, Amy thought, and suddenly you see your reflection, and you're a monster. — Gordon Korman

When I was a young girl salmon fishing with my father in the Straits of Juan de Fuca in Washington State I used to lean out over the water and try to look past my own face, past the reflection of the boat, past the sun and darkness, down to where the fish were surely swimming. I made up charm songs and word-hopes to tempt the fish, to cause them to mean biting my hook. I believed they would do it if I asked them well and patiently and with the right hope. I am writing my poems like this. I have used the fabric and the people of my life as the bait. — Tess Gallagher

In the chamber of death ... I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter-the Eternity they have entered-where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness ... One might doubt in seasons of cold reflection; but not then in the presence of her corpse. It asserted its own tranquility, which seemed a pledge of equal quiet to its former inhabitant. — Emily Bronte

Oftentimes, the First Noble Truth is misquoted as "All life is suffering," but that is an inaccurate and misleading reflection of the Buddha's insight. He did not teach that life is constant misery, nor that you should expect to feel pain and unhappiness at all times. Rather, he proclaimed that suffering is an unavoidable reality of ordinary human existence that is to be known and responded to wisely. — Ajahn Sumedho

Life is a difficult business ... It needs infinite courage and a lot of endurance. And in the end one wonders: 'Was it worth while?' - Mrs. Lorrimer, Cards on the Table — Agatha Christie

I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life on earth, that led to my genes being created and my standing in this particular garden in a contemplative and imagining mind. I've been reading recently how reflection evolved. what a fascinating solution to the rigors of survival ... how amazing that a few basic ingredients- the same ones that form the mountains, plants, and rivers- when arranged differently and stressed could result in us.
More and more of late, I find myself standing outside of life, with a sense of the human saga laid out before me. it is a private vision, balanced between youth and old age, a vision in which I understand how caught up in striving we humans get, and a little of why, and how difficult it is even to recognize, since it feels integral to our nature and is. but I find it interesting that, according to many religions, life and begins and ends in a garden. — Diane Ackerman

Street lights kill the essence of the night sky. Stars and meteors fade away. No songs or whispers from my blackberry. I drift away to my special place. — Fidelis O. Mkparu

I urge you to sit with yourself for 5 minutes and pour your heart out, ask yourself the serious questions ~ not the day to day duties we get caught up in. I can assure you, the 5 minutes spent reflecting on the life you have lived and how much more you're yet to achieve will spark something in you that we all forgot we have. — Nikki Rowe

I've never really undestood," the unicorn mused as the man picked himself up," what you dream of doing with me, once you've caught me."
The man leaped again, and she slipped away from him like rain. "I don't think you know yourself," she said. — Peter S. Beagle

Might there come a time
When we stand over a grave
And mourn ourselves?
Mourn the past, a previous life?
Shall we weep for the passing of time?
Shall we grieve for unfulfilled dreams?
In my naivety; in my belief
In immortal youth,
I sleep walk through life.
Someone ... wake me up.
Please.
Wake me up. — Samantha Young

A moment's reflection will show you that you play many roles in the course of a day . . . and that who you are from moment to moment changes. There is the angry you, and the kind you, the lazy you, the lustful you - hundreds of different you's. Gurdjieff points out that sometimes one "you" does something for which all the other "you's" must pay for years or possibly the rest of this life. — Ram Dass

If all things in this universe exist, it is because they participate in the Being of God, if there are some things with life, it is because they are reflections of the life of God; if there are beings endowed with intellect and will - like men and angels - it's because they are a participation of the Sovereign Intellect which is God. — Fulton J. Sheen

When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind's disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation. — Gerard De Nerval

Who am I? What am I doing here? Who are these others? This trilogy of spiritual conundrums is as practical as it is philosophical. Mindful inquiry devoted to these three questions is as spiritual as it is material and as obvious as it is unanswerable. Knowledge isn't to comfort our souls; it is to enhance awareness - that is what some call an awakening. Some things have to be believed to be seen. Feelings articulate truth in ways that our brains cannot. We may have a sense about who we are, what our purpose is and how we relate to the rest of the world even without the vocabulary to articulate it. Recovery is visceral as much as it is intellectual. The Eleventh Step is our spiritual barometer, feeding back sensations, feelings and thoughts as we observe our life. — Joe C.

The idea that I am a bad person or exhibiting poor character traits by my disdain for someone can be irrelevant and false. If I meet someone I immediately dislike, for what ever reason, but I am polite and courteous, helpful and pleasant then I have been polite, courteous, helpful and pleasant. This is not at all the same as then finding someone else to gossip with and verbalize my disdain for that person. It is certainly not the same as being outright rude to that person. What I have thought is of no consequence here. My actions show who I am, not my thoughts. The same can be said of the basic premise of being spiritual itself. If I seek to be spiritual and yet find no time in my life for reflection on what this should and does mean to me am I being spiritual at all? The actions we relate to as being spiritual are the natural outcome of such reflection in our lives. When we are true to our own sense of integrity we naturally find compassion for others. — David Carlyle

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted. — George Santayana

Eid is a time of joy, after a season of fasting and prayer and reflection. Each year, the end of Ramadan means celebration and thanksgiving for millions of Americans. And your joy during this season enriches the life of our great country. This year, Eid is celebrated at the same time as Hanukkah and Advent. So it's a good time for people of these great faiths, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, to remember how much we have in common: devotion to family, a commitment to care for those in need, a belief in God and His justice, and the hope for peace on earth. — George W. Bush

Life here on Earth is promised suffering and one needs to find ways to live through it. Many people turn to meditation and prayer - anything that can connect us deeper into ourselves and with the divine. — Kat Lahr