Great Throughts Treasury

"Love is the creative power of the universe that manifests as strength and beauty. To love is to know God and the inmost nature of the ultimate Reality… Love is letting go of fear and worry… Love consecrates life… By letting go of separateness we see love as the reflection of our own self and harmony in the inconsistencies and imperfections of the existence and explore joy in the midst of the pains and problems of life." - Bibhuti Mazumder

"- Good art is nothing but a replica of the perfection of God and a reflection of His art." -

"The Law of Attraction attracts to you everything you need, according to the nature of your thought life. Your environment and financial condition are the perfect reflection of your habitual thinking. Thought rules the world." - Joseph Murphy

"Theology is reflection upon the reality of worship and explication of it. As such it is a rational affair… faith seeking to understand." - Albert Cook Outler

"The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death." - Thomas Paine

"There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts; those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking, and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.”" - Thomas Paine

"We, undisciplined in discernment of the inward, knowing nothing of it, run after the outer, never understanding that it is the inner which stirs us; we are [like] one who sees his own reflection but not realizing whence it comes goes in pursuit of it." -

"It is in deeds that man becomes aware of what his life really is, of his power to harm and to hurt, to wreck and to ruin; of his ability to derive joy and to bestow it upon others; to relieve and to increase his own and other people’s tensions. It is in the employment of his will, not in reflection, that he meets his own self as it is; not as he should like it to be." - Fritz A. Rothschild

"What cannot be grasped in reflection, we comprehend in deeds… The true goal for man is to be what he does… Man is more than what he does. What he does is spiritually a minimum of what he is. Deeds are outpourings, not the essence of the self." - Fritz A. Rothschild

"Prayer is not just the informing of God of our needs, for He already knows them. God does not show Himself equally to all creatures. This does not mean that he has favorites, that He decides to help some and to abandon others, but the difference occurs because it is impossible for Him to manifest Himself to certain hearts under the conditions they set up. The sunlight plays no favorites, but its reflection is very different on a lake and on a swamp." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

"The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it in turn will look sourly at you; laugh at it, and with it, and it is a jolly, kind companion." - William Makepeace Thackeray

"Spiritual experiences are so consistent across cultures, across time, and across faiths that it suggests a common core that is likely a reflection of structures and processes in the human brain." - David Wulff

"A lively, disinterested, persistent looking for truth is extraordinarily rare. Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not to be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism or doubt" -

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms." - Albert Einstein

"Depression, almost invariably, is a reflection of an individual's low estimation of oneself, because the depressed person feels that: "Things are going badly in my life;" and, "I am too weak and inadequate to handle these things or make them better, and therefore I am a pretty bad person."" - Albert Ellis

"When occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection." - Alexander Hamilton

"Understanding comes through reflection. It escapes many who only read." - Arthur W Osborn

"Affliction appears to be the guide to reflection; the teacher of humility; the parent of repentance; the nurse of faith; the strengthener of patience, and the promoter of charity." - Author Unknown NULL

"Self-reflection is the school of wisdom." - Baltasar Gracián

"Unless a man takes himself sometimes out of the world, by retirement and self-reflection, he will be in danger of losing himself in the world." - Benjamin Whichcote

"Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity; to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside." - Blaise Pascal

"Poverty is not wholly a personal failure. It also represents the failure of an economic system. And the remedy is not wholly one of charity, but of political and economic action. Poverty is a reflection also no those who are not poor." -

"He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul; and he that studies only books, the soul without the body. He that to what he sees, adds observation, and to what he reads, reflection, is on the right road to knowledge, provided that in scrutinizing the hearts of others, he neglects not his own." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Like the rainbow, peace rests upon the earth, but its arch is lost in heaven. Heaven bathes it in hues of light - it springs up amid tears and clouds - it is a reflection of the eternal sun - it is an assurance of calm - it is the sign of a great covenant between God and man - it is an emanation from the distant orb of immortal light." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Mental pleasures never clog; unlike those of the body, they are increased by repetition, approved of by reflection, and strengthened by enjoyment." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Mental pleasures never cloy; unlike those of the body, they are increased by repetition, approved of by reflection, and strengthened by enjoyment." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Study without reflection is a waste of time; reflection without study is dangerous." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

"The wider the scope of my reflection on the present and past, the more I am impressed by their mockery of human plans in every transaction." - Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL

"Law is a reflection and a source of prejudice. It both enforces and suggests forms of bias." - Diane B. Schulder

"The religious concentration of the soul appears in the form of feeling; it nevertheless passes also into reflection; a form of worship is a result of reflection. The second form of the union of the objective and subjective in the human spirit is art. This advances farther into the realm of the actual and sensuous than religion. In its nobles walk it is occupied with representing, not indeed, the spirit of God, but certainly the form of God; and in its secondary aims, that which is divine and spiritual generally. Its office is to render visible the divine; presenting it to the imaginative and intuitive faculty. but the true is the object not only of conception and feeling, as in religion - and of intuition, as in art - but also of the thinking faculty; and this gives us the third form of the union in question - philosophy." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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

"Transparent Man, who is seen and seen through, foolish, who has nothing left to hide, who has become transparent through self-acceptance; his soul is loved, wholly revealed, wholly existential; he is just what he is, freed from paranoid concealment, from the knowledge of his secrets and his secret knowledge; his transparency serves as a prism for the world and the not-world. For it is impossible reflectively to know thyself; only the last reflection of an obituary may tell the truth, and only God knows our real names." - James Hillman

"Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection." - Jean-Paul Sartre

"Thus it is - that, by the comparative blindness of man in each preceding period, the like blindness in each succeeding period is secured: without the trouble or need of reflection, men, by opulence rendered indolent, and by indolence and self-indulgence doomed to ignorance, follow their leaders - as sheep follow sheep, and geese geese." - Jeremy Bentham

"Grief drives men into habits of serious reflection, sharpens the understanding and softens the heart." - John Adams

"How little of our knowledge of mankind is derived from intentional accurate observation! Most of it has, unsought, found its way into the mind from the continual presentations of the objects to our unthinking view. It is a knowledge of sensation more than of reflection." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster

"What is thought to be the responsible public opinion is, at any given time, a reflection of the needs and interests of the corporate technostructure." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"

"Always vote for principle, though you vote alone, and you may cherish the sweet reflection that your vote is never lost." - John Quincy Adams

"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." - John Quincy Adams

"Discourses on morality and reflection on human nature are the best means we can make use of to improve our minds, gain a true knowledge of ourselves, and recover our souls out of the vice, ignorance, and prejudice which naturally cleave to them." - Joseph Addison

"For the reality to which the artist and the mystic are exposed, is in fact, the same. It is of their own inmost truth brought to consciousness: by the mystic, in direct confrontation, and by the artist, through reflection in the masterworks of his art. The fact that the nature of the artist (as a microcosm) and the nature of the universe (as the macrocosm) are two aspects of the same reality (respectively, as a minute part of the whole, experienced from within, and as the whole, viewed from without... accounts sufficiently for that creative interplay of discovery and recognition which alerts the artist to the possibility of a revelatory composition in which outer and inner realities are recognized as the same." - Joseph Campbell

"To doubt everything and to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both free us from the necessity of reflection." - Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré

"Reflection is the beginning of reform." -

"Action and reflection should ideally complement and support each other. Action by itself is blind, reflection impotent." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

"Every substance is only the reflection or rhyme of some truth." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"God enters by a private door into every individual. Long prior to reflection is the thinking of the mind." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV, it's a shame more people don't switch over to it." -

"A woman’s friendship borders more closely on love than man’s. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of attachment." -

"There is one art of which every man should be master - the art of reflection. If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?" -