In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished a word that for them has no sense but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.
All relationships are a reflection of our relationship to ourself.
And since you know you cannot see yourself, so well as by reflection, I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself, that of yourself which you yet know not of.
What message, years of conflagration, have you: madness or hope? On thin cheeks strained by war and liberation bloody reflections still remain.
He studied cities as women study their reflections.
Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.
RATIONAL, adj. Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.
In this mirror, I am enclosed a live and real as you. Imagine angels and not like the reflections.
You cannot tie your fiance to the railroad track of self-reflection and personal improvement.
I think the greatest gift we can give our children is the experience of deep quiet. If we don't help our children cultivate contemplation, reflection, prayer, meditation, or whatever other practice of mindfulness, then they're likely to be completely spun out of their center by the time they're in grade school.
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
I'm like a shark, right at the top of the food chain. I take what I want, when I want. I truly am the reflection of perfection.
A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.
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.
Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.
We saw Time's varied traces Were deep on every hand - Indeed, upon the people, More marked than on the land. The bands that once with firmness Could grasp the axe and blade, Now move with trembling motion, By strength of nerve decayed. The change in form and feature And furrows on the cheek Of Time's increasing volume, In plain, round numbers speak. And thus, as in a mirror's Reflection, we were told, With stereotyped impressions, The fact of growing old.
Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society. The greatest playwrights are moralists.
I have found that the more I reflect philosophically on the attributes of God the more overwhelmed I become at his greatness and the more excited I become about Bible doctrine. Whereas easy appeals to mystery prematurely shut off reflection about God, rigorous and earnest effort to understand him is richly rewarded with deeper appreciation of who he is, more confidence in his reality and care, and a more intelligent and profound worship of his person.
Autonomy is the capacity to act on principles that are one's own and one will exercise this capacity by means of a process of rational reflection on these principles. Autonomy is thought to be necessary for attributing political responsibility.
Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.