self reflection Quotes

“In spite of the pain, his first feeling was one of relief. There was nothing to be afraid of any more. He was a terror himself now and nothing in the world but a knight (and not all of those) would dare to attack him. He could get even with Caspian and Edmund now.... But the moment he thought this he realised that he didn’t want to. He wanted to be friends. He wanted to get back among humans and talk and laugh and share things. He realised that he was a monster cut off from the whole human race. An appalling loneliness came over him. He began to see the others had not really been fiends at all. He began to wonder if he himself had always been such a nice person as he had always supposed.”

″[F]eeling herself suddenly shriveled, aged, breastless, the grinding, blowing, flowering of the day, out of doors, out of the window, out of her body and brain which now failed...”

“What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.”

“I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.”

“I should . . . try to make the best of what remains of my day.”

“Close your eyes and stare into the dark.”

“My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain.”

“I see it all raving before me the endless yakking kitchen mouthings of life, the long dark grave of tomby talks under midnight kitchen bulbs, in fact it fills me with love to realize that life so avid and misunderstood nevertheless reaches out skinny skeleton hand to me and to Billie too -- But you know what I mean. And this is the way it begins.”

“The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.”

“As I started to think seriously about how I could become the person I wanted to be, I looked around at some of the people who’d had the biggest impact on my life.”

“It’s time to sit down and think about what’s truly important to you and then take steps to forsake the rest.”

“I thought of myself as a free-floating one-celled amoeba, minding my own business.”

“Celerity is never more admired Than by the negligent. ”

“At the end of any relationship you take a long, hard look at the years that have gone by and say “What now”?

“When we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.”

“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.”

“Indeed, the important question in terms of becoming more peaceful isn’t whether or not you’re going to have negative thoughts – you are – it’s what you choose to do with the ones that you have.”

“Act, reflect. Act, reflect. NEVER act and reflect at the same time.”

“Every now and then I could see myself—truly see myself—and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was the woman with the hole in her heart.”

“Maybe a nice look in the mirror is in order, Missy.”

“The empty void inside of her was a new experience, or maybe it had always been there, and she’d been so harassed, so put upon that she hadn’t had time for self-reflection.”

“There is no looking-glass here and I don’t know what I am like now... The girl I saw was myself not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us – hard, cold, and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?”

“I just... I caught myself thinking about it over and over. And then I realized that I was simply remembering it as something that was wrong with me. That was the story I was telling myself - that I was somehow inferior. Isn’t that interesting? The past is just a story we tell ourselves.”

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

“Life is a cruel, horrible joke and I am the punch line.”

“Every night I come to the same place and wait until the sky catches up with my mood.”

“Mindfulness not only makes it possible to survey our internal landscape with compassion and curiosity but can also actively steer us in the right direction for self-care.”

“The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself.”

Heart’s Delight opens with a 16-year-old boy poised over a desk. He is alone in the room, going through the left over items of a relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Ann-Kathrin. As he systematically destroys each object, he replays a scene from their relationship that relates to it.

“What we think about ourselves becomes the truth for us.”

“In that moment of “raw reality,” as Mark Allen has called it, when something inside you asks, How bad do you want it?, an inner curtain is drawn open, revealing a part of you that is not seen except in moments of crisis. And when your answer is to keep pushing, you come away from the trial with the kind of self-knowledge and self-respect that can’t be bought.”

″...study yourself and try to find out if there are qualities in you which are as good as those discovered in others.”

″‘Regret’ can be my memoir’s theme, she thought, as she tried to shove the cheese grater into the dishwasher next to the frying pan. A Regretful Life, by Joy Delaney.”

“I have been Foolish and Deluded,” said he, “and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.”

Well, he was humming this hum to himself, and walking along gaily, wondering what everybody else was doing, and what it felt like, being somebody else, when suddenly he came to a sandy bank, and in the bank was a large hole.

I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death.

How my heart beat as he came running across the field to me! He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.

He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.

The adventure of meeting Gallaher after eight years, of finding himself with Gallaher in Corless’s surrounded by lights and noise, of listening to Gallaher’s stories and of sharing for a brief space Gallaher’s vagrant and triumphant life, upset the equipoise of his sensitive nature.

“I had many bright thoughts in my bath this morning,” began Antony. “The brightest one of all was that we were being damn fools, and working at this thing from the wrong end altogether.”

“I make so many mistakes. But then just think of all the mistakes I don’t make, although I might.”

I,—a man of thought,—the bookworm of great libraries,—a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,—what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own!

“Surely, it were child’s play, to call in a physician, and then hide the sore!”

“In permitting this, I have surely acted a false part by the only man to whom the power was left me to be true!”

“It was I, not less than he. Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?”

She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured, and reciprocated, the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own.

Of penance, I have had enough! Of penitence, there has been none!

“Serve me right, selfish pig, to let you go, and stay writing rubbish myself!”

“I keep turning over new leaves, and spoiling them, as I used to spoil my copybooks, and I make so many beginnings there never will be an end,” he said dolefully.

Monte Cristo pressed his hands to his forehead. What was passing in that brain, so loaded with dreadful secrets? What does the angel of light or the angel of darkness say to that mind, at once implacable and generous? God only knows.

“You are most kind; but as regards myself, I can find no merit I possess, save that, as a millionaire, I might have become a partner in the speculations of M. Aguado and M. Rothschild; but as my motive in travelling to your capital would not have been for the pleasure of dabbling in stocks, I stayed away till some favorable chance should present itself of carrying my wish into execution.”

Why should I pause to ask how much of my shrinking from Provis might be traced to Estella? Why should I loiter on my road, to compare the state of mind in which I had tried to rid myself of the stain of the prison before meeting her at the coach-office, with the state of mind in which I now reflected on the abyss between Estella in her pride and beauty, and the returned transport whom I harboured? The road would be none the smoother for it, the end would be none the better for it, he would not be helped, nor I extenuated.

The kind of submission or resignation that he showed was that of a man who was tired out. I sometimes derived an impression, from his manner or from a whispered word or two which escaped him, that he pondered over the question whether he might have been a better man under better circumstances. But he never justified himself by a hint tending that way, or tried to bend the past out of its eternal shape.

Before, he had taken great pride in how considerate he was but now it hardly occurred to him that he had become so thoughtless about the others.

When she mused on the past, she dwelt with pleasure, with tenderness, on the memories of her relations with Levin. The memories of childhood and of Levin’s friendship with her dead brother gave a special poetic charm to her relations with him. His love for her, of which she felt certain, was flattering and delightful to her; and it was pleasant for her to think of Levin. In her memories of Vronsky there always entered a certain element of awkwardness, though he was in the highest degree well-bred and at ease, as though there were some false note—not in Vronsky, he was very simple and nice, but in herself, while with Levin she felt perfectly simple and clear. But, on the other hand, directly she thought of the future with Vronsky, there arose before her a perspective of brilliant happiness; with Levin the future seemed misty.

“Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive,” thought Levin, as he came away from the Shtcherbatskys’, and walked in the direction of his brother’s lodgings. “And I don’t get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position.” And he pictured to himself Vronsky, happy, good-natured, clever, and self-possessed, certainly never placed in the awful position in which he had been that evening. “Yes, she was bound to choose him. So it had to be, and I cannot complain of anyone or anything. I am myself to blame. What right had I to imagine she would care to join her life to mine? Who am I and what am I? A nobody, not wanted by anyone, nor of use to anybody.”

Dolly was a little embarrassed and anxious in the new surroundings in which she found herself. Abstractly, theoretically, she did not merely justify, she positively approved of Anna’s conduct. As is indeed not unfrequent with women of unimpeachable virtue, weary of the monotony of respectable existence, at a distance she not only excused illicit love, she positively envied it. Besides, she loved Anna with all her heart. But seeing Anna in actual life among these strangers, with this fashionable tone that was so new to Darya Alexandrovna, she felt ill at ease.

“How is she to blame? She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening to her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and have been loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me,” she thought about her husband, “and I put up with him. Is that any better?”

“What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed for me.”

If ever at any moment she had been asked what she was thinking of, she could have answered truly: of the same thing, of her happiness and her unhappiness.