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Reflection is conscious, deliberate thinking

• Reflection: Serious thought or consideration. Oxford Dictionary
• Reflection: Serious and careful thought. Cambridge Dictionary
• Reflection: A thought occurring in consideration or meditation. Dictionary.com
• 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
• Contemplation,  Thinking,   Meditation,  Observation,  Learning,  Making time to think

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A life of wisdom combines reflection and action

• Each human being was given two possibilities: action and contemplation. Both lead to the same place. Paulo Coelho
• The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action. M. Scott Peck
• What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action. Meister Eckhart
• It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, nor the amount of religious conversation in which you mix, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things till the truth in them becomes your own and part of your being, that ensures your growth. Frederick William Robertson
• We live in a time when speed seems to be essential. Fast trains, fast cars, fast walking, fast- food restaurants. Even our perception of growth is speeded up with the use of the stop-frame camera.  There is nothing wrong with speed in itself, but a question is forced upon us.  Does speed necessarily require us to be unreflective?  If so, then we are rushing into lives that are not reflected upon, not examined.  This is dangerous.  Perhaps we do have to make room for patience in our lives-  -a little room to breathe.    Patience.   Edward J. Lavin
• Wisdom, Insight,  Action

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Reflection is a skill and an art

• There is one art of which we all should be master–the art of reflection. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Just because we increase the speed of information doesn’t mean we can increase the speed of decisions. Pondering, reflecting and ruminating are undervalued skills in our culture. Dale Dauten

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Reflection can transform your world view

• Don’t you notice that there are particular moments when you are naturally inspired to introspection? Work with them gently, for these are the moments when you can go through a powerful experience, and your whole worldview can change quickly. Sogyal Rinpoche
• Seeing within changes one’s outer vision. Joseph Chilton Pearce

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Reflection can reveal valuable truths and insights

• Only by much searching and mining are gold and diamonds obtained, and one can find every truth connected with one’s being if that person will dig deep into the mine of his or her soul. James Allen
• I sincerely believe that there is a time in life for drifting. There is a time for sitting back and getting in touch with yourself.  Some of our most interesting illuminations and ideas will come when we take time to reflect, time to kick back and cruise awhile.  Rudolfo Anaya
• It takes a certain ingenuous faith – but I have it – to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth. C. Grayling
• The object of reflection is invariably the discovery of something satisfying to the mind which was not there at the beginning of the search. Ernest Dimnet
• Thoughtful reflection on natural experience, in the light of conceptual ideas, is the most powerful tool we have for management learning. Henry Mintzberg
• Truth,  Insight

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Reflection can transform your inner life

• Most true happiness comes from one’s inner life, from the disposition of the mind and soul. Admittedly, a good inner life is difficult to achieve, especially in these trying times. It takes reflection and contemplation and self- discipline. William L. Shirer

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Reflection brings wisdom

• 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
• The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action. M. Scott Peck
• Wisdom

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More rewards of reflection

• The real person smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection. Thomas Paine
• Glowing moments of peaceful reflection kindle the growth of our minds and spirits.
• The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. Dag Hammarskjold
• It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment. Marcus Tullius Cicero
• Reflection is where meaning is created, behaviors are regulated, values are refined, assumptions are challenged, intuition is accessed, and where we learn about who we are. Michael McKinney
• Reflection is looking in so you can look out with a broader, bigger, and more accurate perspective. Mick Ukleja and Robert Lorber
• The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates
• A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted. George Santayana

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Make quiet time in your life for reflection

• Quietness with thoughtful reflection and relaxation can be empowering. Cynthia Wright
• I keep a level head and consider all things with calm reflection.
• Usually, when the distractions of daily life deplete our energy, the first thing we eliminate is the thing we we need the most: quiet, reflective time. Time to dream, time to contemplate what’s working and what’s not, so that we can make changes for the better. Sarah Breathnach
• Only when the clamor of the outside world is silenced will you be able to hear the deeper vibration. Listen carefully. Sarah Ban Breathnach
• We can learn to trust ourselves by inquiring within. To practice doing this, sit quietly, close your eyes, and for a minute focus your attention on your breathing.  Gently visualize your inner wisdom as a graceful butterfly.  Admire her beauty, and encourage your butterfly to sit on your shoulder and whisper her wisdom in your ear.  Be still and listen.  Sue Patton Thoele
• Take time to be quiet. This is something that we don’t do enough in this busy world of ours. We rush, rush, rush, and we are constantly listening to noise all around us.  The human heart was meant for times of quiet, to peer deep within.  It is when we do this that our hearts are set free to soar and take flight on the wings of our own dreams!  Schedule some quiet “dream time” this week.  No other people.  No cell phone.  No computer.  Just you, a pad, a pen, and your thoughts. Jim Rohn
• Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it. Robert M. Pirsig

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Spend time alone with yourself to reflect

• By all means use sometimes to be alone. Salute thyself; see what thy soul doth wear.    George Herbert
• Book a meeting with yourself, when you are off-limits to everything but your thoughts. Daniel Patrick Forrester
• Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours; whenever she was alone, she gave way to it as the greatest relief; and not a day went by without a solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of unpleasant recollections. Jane Austen
• Reflection is in many ways a lost art. It is an eyepiece to a world hidden away, the world within ourselves which is alive with truths and beauties and darkness we have never glimpsed.  It seems sad that we slice our time too thin for dreaming long dreams and thinking long thoughts.  We’ve grown uncomfortable with that sort of thing.  For a long time I had been uneasy left alone.  I would snap on the television or grab a book or make brownies.    I suppose we are restless all alone with ourselves, all alone in a room with a stranger.  What if we face ourselves and find we don’t like the person we meet?  I didn’t even want to spend much time in prayer because God might confront me and I’d have to look at myself.  Sue Monk Kidd
• It is necessary … for a man to go away by himself … to sit on a rock … and ask, ‘Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going? ‘ Carl Sandburg
• Solitude

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Use reflection to break through the surface ideas, truths, laws

• Break through the surface ideas, truths, laws, whatever it is that we are contemplating, to explore their deeper meaning and implications. John Kehoe

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Complement your reflection with practice and experience

• Study the heart and the mind of man, and begin with your own. Meditation and reflection must lay the foundation of that knowledge, but experience and practice must, and alone can, complete it. Lord Chesterfield
• In fact, the truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act; not merely to reflect. D. T. Suzuki
• Practice,  Experience

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Reflect on knowledge and facts that you acquire

• Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity enjoy the accumulating of facts far more than the pausing at times to reflect on those facts. Clarence Day
• Knowledge,  Facts

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Reflect on what you read

• Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. Albert Einstein
• Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting. Edmund Burke
• The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. Christopher Morley
• Read less and think more. Read about great things and think about great questions and issues. Wallace D. Wattles
• You are not mentally developed by what you read, but by what you think about what you read. Wallace D. Wattles
• Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Francis Bacon
• Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. John Locke
• 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. Arthur Schopenhauer
• Reading

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Reflect on what you learn

• In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate. René Descartes
• Learning

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Reflect on your fears

• Getting your fears down on paper is important, because trying to think them through never works. You get caught in endless loops of negativity that only lead you further down the rabbit hole, and make your life miserable. Henri Junttila
• Write about what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open. Natalie Goldberg
• Fear

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Reflect on painful, distressing life experiences

• Find meaning through expressive writing. Write about your distressing or painful life experience.  Describe the experience in detail and explore your personal reactions and deepest emotions fully.  When an experience has structure and meaning, it seems much more manageable and controllable than when it’s represented by a chaotic and painful jumble of thoughts and images.  Sonja Lyubomirsky
• Whatever it is that you write, putting words on the page is a form of therapy that doesn’t cost a dime and it is certainly a productive way to deal with the scars and dark places from our pasts. Self- expression is one way to lay a problem or demon to rest. It’s also a way to bring forth suppressed feelings and fears. It’s a way to bring a sense of resolution and a sense of satisfaction to our lives. Diana Raab
• Pain,  Suffering,  Adversity,  Challenge

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Reflect on your mistakes to learn from them

• In all the work we do, our most valuable asset can be the attitude of self-examination. It is forgivable to make mistakes, but to stand fast behind a wall of self-righteousness and make the same mistake twice is not forgivable. Dale Turne
• Mistakes

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Reflect on what is causing you pain

• When there is pain, the animal instinct is ‘fight or flight’ (i.e., to either strike back or run away) – reflect instead. When you can calm yourself down, thinking about the dilemma that is causing you pain will bring you to a higher level and enlighten you, leading to progress. Ray Dalio
• Since the only way you are going to find solutions to painful problems is by thinking deeply about them—i.e., reflecting — if you can develop a knee-jerk reaction to pain that is to reflect rather than to fight or flee, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving. Ray Dalio
• …real childhood scars heal, but not when band-aids replace self-reflection. Cameron Conaway
• Pain

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Reflect on the meaning of life

• The worst insult I can inflict on life is that I do not reflect on its meaning. Kedar Joshi
• Meaning

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Reflect on your life and the activities that fill your days

• We must, like a painter, take time to stand back from our work, to be still, and thus see what’s what. . . True repose is standing back to survey the activities that fill our days. William McNamara

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Reflect on the blessings in your life

• Reflect upon your present blessings — of which every man has many — not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. Charles Dickens
• Gratitude, Appreciation

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Reflect on your past

• 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. Randolph Silliman Bourne
• In retrospect, the past seems not one existence with a continuous flow of years and events that follow each other in logical sequence, but a life periodically dividing into entirely separate compartments. Change of surroundings, interests, pursuits, has made it seem actually more like different incarnations. Eleanor Robson Belmont
• The past

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Reflect back to understand what is coming

• Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Soren Kierkegaard
• Sometimes, you have to look back in order to understand the things that lie ahead. Yvonne Woon
• Understanding,  The future

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Reflect on yourself …

• To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is. Carl Jung
• Study yourself. Find your strong points and make them stronger as well as your weak ones and strengthen them. Study yourself carefully and you will see yourself as you really are. Theron Q. Dumont
• Self-knowledge

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… through introspection

• But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away.  Not ever.  The only way out is in.  Junot Díaz
• You turn inward. There’s nothing to distract you, so you begin to look at yourself.  Frank Bianco
• Anybody desirous of success should spend some time in introspection and contemplation. Sam Veda
• Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.  Carl Jung
• We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world–introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably–that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbours is to know ourselves. Walter Lippman
• The philosophy of the wisest person that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection. William Godwin
• Through love and sincerity continuously beautify your inner life in every way, by daily looking into the mirror of introspection. Paramahansa Yogananda

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Reflect on the world and where it is going

• I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improves the quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used. What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going. Alan Lightman

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Reflect through writing for it crystalises your thinking

• I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living. Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• I write to understand as much as to be understood. Elie Wiesel
• It is proven that writing down our thoughts, intentions, desires, plans and goals helps clarify our thinking. Tehmina Zama
• The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. Norbet Platt
• What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written. Jacques Derrida
• When you use words, you’re able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence. Gao Xingjian
• When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools. Michael Leboeuf
• Write in recollection and amazement for yourself. Jack Kerouac
• Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought. Stephen Covey
• Writing has immense power. You don’t realize it until you use it. It brings about clarity, solidifies resolve, fortifies ideas, keeps you focused and, observed over a period, reveals deeper insights than mere thinking was capable of. Rahul Singh
• Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation. Graham Greene
• Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard. David McCullough
• I consider writing practice a true Zen practice because it all comes back at you. You can’t fool anyone because it’s on the page. Natalie Goldberg
• Writing out your ruminations can help you organise them, make sense of them, and observe patterns you haven’t perceived before. Sonja Lyubomirsky
• This is why it’s so important to write things out and look at every single way you might perceive a particular incident. Just the act of writing down the words shakes loose the emotions that are tied to the incident. When we’re willing to have some fun and play with our interpretations we can reexamine our choices. When we bring them out of the darkness and into the light, they can be healed. Debbie Ford
• Writing is a tool of transformation and can shine the light on the inside, dispelling darkness, taking us through external layers, bringing us closer to our souls. Hillary Carlip
• Writing

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Keep a journal of your thoughts, learnings and experiences

• Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context. Stephen Covey

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Reflect through walking

• All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking. Friedrich Nietzsche
• Walking

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Set aside a day just to think and reflect

• What we really have to do is take a day and sit down and think. The world is not going to end or fall apart. Jobs won’t be lost.  Kids will not run crazy in one day.  Lovers won’t stop speaking to you. Husbands and wives are not going to disappear.  Just take that one day and think.  Don’t read.  Don’t write.  No television, no radio, no distractions.  Sit down and think. . . . Go sit in a church, or in the park, or take a long walk and think.  Call it a healing day.  Maya Angelou
• Dedicate time to thinking

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• Rational, adj. Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection. Ambrose Bierce

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