C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Reflection
Think on thy sins.
But with the morning cool reflections came.
The learn’d reflect on what before they knew.
There is one art of which man should be master,—the art of reflection.
Reflection makes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment.
The custom of frequent reflection will keep their minds from running adrift, and call their thoughts home from useless unattentive roving.
Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revery is the same flower, when rank and running to seed.
The advice of a scholar, whose piles of learning were set on fire by imagination, is never to be forgotten. Proportion an hour’s reflection to an hour’s reading, and so dispirit the book into the student.
The solitary side of our nature demands leisure for reflection upon subjects on which the dash and whirl of daily business, so long as its clouds rise thick about us, forbid the intellect to fasten itself.
When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire forsake me; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I reflect how vain it is to grieve for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying beside those who deposed them, when I behold rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men who divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the frivolous competitions, factions, and debates of mankind.