Daniel Handler Quotes

If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea.

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

Its never too late to take a moment to look.

It took me 10 years to realize that I don't know 'em, 10 years to realize that it's possible to learn them, then another 10 years to learn how to do things.

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

I caught up on a lot of just domestic normal everyday stuff, and grew up a lot, and went to therapy, and did a lot of contemplating and figuring things out. I needed to just strip everything away and figure out who I am and get to know myself, as cheesy as that sounds.

My goal is to get quieter as I get older.

Never be afraid to sit a while and think.

Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience.

It's very important for people to know what gives them meaning. But it's hard for people to figure out if you're not connecting with yourself and taking the time to just be introspective and daydream.

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

We have so committed ourselves in different ways that we have hardly any time for self-reflection, to observe, to study.

As I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who have taken away my time are those who have given me something to say.

Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself.

A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yesterdays; for to-day and to-morrow are here, with their impatient tasks. The world is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs masterpieces.

I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.

In the end, we need two things to lead a balanced life - a sense of the world and a sense of ourselves; it's like breathing in and breathing out. And if you can only get to know the world by stepping out, and losing yourself in experience, you can only get to know the self by stepping back, and finding yourself in contemplation. One without the other leads to a kind of madness.

Without time for loss you don't have time for soul.

Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty.

I want you to think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass.

Self-reflection, or - what comes to the same thing - the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man. In this way our existence as separate beings, our former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious, the sources of conflict are dried up.

If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affect you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you; and then show your copy to whom you please.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.