Useful Reflection Coaching Quotes

When you are quiet you are connected
Your silence brings out
Your self understanding that
You are part of the sacred world
It's your silence that connects you to the sacred world.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

Neurons that fire together, wire together.

The best way to avenge yourself is to not be like that.

The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets by it but what he becomes by it.

Those who are unaware they are walking in darkness will never seek the light.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words or actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men … and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "This is the real me."

The Perfectibility of Man! Ah heaven, what a dreary theme! The perfectibility of the Ford car! The perfectibility of which man? I am many men. Which of them are you going to perfect? I am not a mechanical contrivance.

Education! Which of the various me's do you propose to educate, and which do you propose to suppress?

Anyhow, I defy you. I defy you, oh society, to educate me or to suppress me, according to your dummy standards.

The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln? The ideal man! Roosevelt or Porfirio Diaz?

There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. What am I doing, playing the patient ass in a tweed jacket? Who am I talking to? Who are you, at the other end of this patience?

Who are you? How many selves have you? And which of these selves do you want to be?

Is Yale College going to educate the self that is in the dark of you, or Harvard College?

The ideal self! Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows. See his red eyes in the dark? This is the self who is coming into his own.

The perfectibility of man, dear God! When every man as long as he remains alive is in himself a multitude of conflicting men. Which of these do you choose to perfect, at the expense of every other?

Old Daddy Franklin will tell you. He'll rig him up for you, the pattern American. Oh, Franklin was the first downright American. He knew what he was about, the sharp little man. He set up the first dummy American.

At the beginning of his career this cunning little Benjamin drew up for himself a creed that should 'satisfy the professors of every religion, but shock none'.

Now wasn't that a real American thing to do?

I have read nearly everything that our historians and poets have written, and even our story-tellers, although the latter are considered frivolous; and to such reading I owe perhaps more instruction than I have gathered in the somewhat varied situations of my own life.

The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books.

But books lie, even those that are most sincere.

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The poets transport us into a world which is vaster and more beautiful than our own, with more ardor and sweetness, different therefore, and in practice almost uninhabitable.

The philosophers, in order to study reality pure, subject it to about the same transformation as fire or pestle make substance undergo: nothing that we have known of a person or a fact seems to subsist in those ashes or those crystals to which they are reduced.

Historians propose to us systems too perfect for explaining the past, with sequence of cause and effect much too exact and clear to have been entirely true;

[...]

Direct observation of man is a method still less satisfactory, limited as it frequently is to the cheap reflections which human malice enjoys.

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Almost everything that we know about anyone else is at second hand.

Each of our acts affects us in far reaching ways. Every action, thought and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect. If we participate in the cause, it is not possible for us not to participate in the effect. In this most profound way, we are held responsible for our every action, thought and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention. We ourselves shall partake of the fruit of our every intention. Is it therefore wise for us to become aware of the many intentions that inform our experience.

Yet the noble despair of the poets
Is nothing of the sort; it is silly
To refuse the tasks of time
And, overlooking our lives,
Cry, "miserable wicked me,
How interesting I am."
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

Naturalness is called the Way.

The Way has no name or form; it is just the essence, just the primal spirit.

... In Taoist terms, the first goal of the Way is to restore the original God-given spirit and become a self-realized human being. In Buddhist terms, a realized human being is someone conscious of the original mind, or the real self, as it is in its spontaneous natural state, independent of environmental conditioning.

This original spirit is also called the celestial mind, or the natural mind. A mode of awareness subtler and more direct than thought or imagination, it is central to the blossoming of the mind. The Secret of the Golden Flower is devoted to the recovery and refinement of the original spirit.

The self leads the soul through its life destiny and evokes its capacities, tendencies, and talents.

If this man had not maintained peace in the world, and revived the economy of the empire, his personal fortunes and misfortunes would have moved me less.

At present, humanity has vast amounts of knowledge but still bery little wisdom. Without developing wisdom, it is most unlikely that we will avoid catastrophe.

If it is conceded that the immortal is imperishable, the soul would be imperishable as well as immortal.

... When death comes to a man, his mortal part, it seems, dies, but the immortal part goes away unharmed and undestroyed, withdrawing from death.

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults – a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Don't be afraid to be weak.
Don't be too proud ot be strong.
Just look into your heart, my friend.
That will be the return to yourself,
The return to innocence

...Don't care what people say
Just follow your own way
Don't give up and use the chance
To return to innocence

Karma provides a groove, a tempo, a track laid out ahead of time for us to work into. There's nothing intrinsically good or bad about karma. Karma is not your burden, oppression, punishment or damnation. It's your rhythm, your path, your underlying track.

The key to good technique is to keep your hands, feet, and hips straight and centered. If you are centered, you can move freely. The physical center is your belly; if your mind is set there as well, you are assured of victory in any endeavor.

This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

If you want to determine the nature of anything, entrust it to time: when the sea is stormy, you can see nothing clearly.

Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.

The rules of the game: learn everything, read everything, inquire into everything, while at the same time adapting to one's ends the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, or the method of Hindu ascetics, who for years, and to the point of exhaustion, try to visualize ever more exactly the images which they create beneath their closed eyelids. Through hundreds of card notes pursue each incident to the very moment that it occurred; endeavor to restore the mobility and suppleness of life to those visages known only to us in stone. When two texts, or two assertions, or perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex.

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those that profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising... partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

It is quite true that man lives by bread alone — when there is no bread. But what happens to man's desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled?

At once other (and 'higher') needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still 'higher') needs emerge and so on. This is what we mean by saying that the basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency.

If knowledge does not liberate the self from the self then ignorance is better than such knowledge.