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Reflection Quotes

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Reflection Quotes

“A stranger can see in an instant something in you that you might spend years learning about yourself. How awful we all are when we look at ourselves under a light, finally seeing our reflections. How little we know about ourselves. How much forgiveness it must take to love a person, to choose not to see their flaws, or to see those flaws and love the person anyway. If you never forgive you’ll always be alone.”

“..when a war ends, what does that look like exactly? do the cells in the body stop detonating themselves? does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother? when the sand in the desert has been melted down to glass and our reflection is not something we can stand to look at does the white flag make for a perfect blindfold? yesterday i was told a story about this little girl in Iraq, six-years-old, who cannot fall asleep because when she does she dreams of nothing but the day she watched her dog eat her neighbor's corpse. if you told her war is over do you think she can sleep?”

“The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride, or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point—for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.”

“Cold as winter, strong as stone; She faced the darkness all alone. A silver goddess; a reflection. A mirage; a recollection. No return; no turning back. The past is gone, the future, black. Serpents gather in their nest, And she stands above the rest. Shadows hunt; she hunts the shadow. The moon is risen; she stands below. She views her world through the eyes of others. Black and white; there are no colors, As she looks down upon a shattered youth. A shattered mirror shows a shattered truth.”

“All this knowledge of the objective world is of no value in comparison to having a little glimpse of the inner sky and its beauty - its sunrises and sunsets, its days and nights, its blue sky and its stars. The outer then looks only a pale reflection of the inner. The inner becomes more real and the outer becomes just a shadow.”

“We evolved. We have only to look at the pouting face of a young chimpanzee to laugh at its reflections of ourselves. We know that more then 98 percent of our genes are shared with the chimpanzee, but we feel the kinship directly when the furry baby puts up its arms to be held.”

“It is always the first and last steps that are the hardest to take. We walk away and try not to turn back, or we stand just outside the gates, terrified to find what's waiting for us now that we've returned. In between, we stumble blindly from one place and life to the next. We try to do the best we can. There are moments like this, however, when we are neither coming nor going, and all we have to do is sit and look back on the life we have made.”

“Your Remedy is within you, but you do not sense it. Your Sickness is from you, but you do not perceive it. You Presume you are a small entity, But within you is enfolded the entire universe. You are indeed the evident book, By whose alphabet the hidden becomes the manifest. Therefore, you have no need to look beyond yourself, What you seek is within you, if only you reflect.”

“Speaking about symmetry, look out our window, and you may see a cardinal attacking its reflection in the window. The cardinal is the only bird we have who often does this. If it has a nest nearby, the cardinal thinks there is another cardinal trying to invade its territory. It never realizes it is attacking its own reflection. Cardinals don't know much about mirror symmetry!”

“No matter what we have come through, or how many perils we have safely passed, or how many imperfect and jagged - in some places perhaps irreparably - our life has been, we cannot in our heart of hearts imagine how it could have been different. As we look back on it, it slips in behind us in orderly array, and, with all its mistakes, acquires a sort of eternal fitness, and even, at times, of poetic glamour.”

“When you look upon another human being and feel great love toward them, or when you contemplate beauty in nature and something within you responds deeply to it, close your eyes for a moment and feel the essence of that love or that beauty within you, inseparable from who you are, your true nature. The outer form is a temporary reflection of what you are within, in your essence. That is why love and beauty can never leave you, although all outer forms will.”

“The Restless Anthropologist is a rich, powerful, and compulsively readable collection of essays by anthropologists who look back at the multiple relationships between their serial fieldwork experiences and their lives. Illustrating the dense interweaving of the personal and the professional that is the hallmark of anthropology as a vocation, these essays are at once affectively deep reflections, and clear-eyed assessments, of lives often lived 'between here and there.' Alma Gottlieb's idea to stimulate these articles and bring together this collection was inspired.”

“If you want to know who you are, look into the true mirror. The flower will reflect your beauty. The sky will reflect your vastness. The ocean will reflect your depth. The child will reflect your innocence. But if you look into the mirror that is unconscious humanity, you are looking into the wrong mirror. Your reflection will be distorted by their projections.”

“The stomach is the seat of all feeling. The heart is the seat of the conscience. The mind is the seat of the ego. Your body is the seat of the soul. When a man goes out in the night and looks up at the universe, he is observing a mirror of himself. The universe within us, is a reflection of the universe we see out our eyes.”