Reflective Analysis Quotes

What is to be once resolved on should be first often well considered.

Reflection is not the evil; but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement.

If we are all in agreement on the decision - then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.

I remember sitting in my room and thinking of where it all went wrong and how I ended up losing control of everything, and I realized I hadn't asked myself one question: And then what? That was my most important lesson. I learned to think about the consequences before the action and that saves me, to this day, from a lot of trouble. If you play it down the line, you'll start making better choices.

I think it is terribly important to have opinions, and to think. We live in a world of action without thought.

The way I look at it is, when you allow people to submerge themselves into a story, they will react by thinking through what it's about. That's just so much more fun and effective, I think, than a lecture.

Survey and test a prospective action before undertaking it. Before you proceed, step back and look at the big picture, lest you act rashly on raw impulse.

Detailed descriptions, abstract ambitions, relevant observations, your's and mine.

Philosophy by showing - including philosophy in literature - does truly valuable work in leading us to new perspectives from which our arguments can then begin. It does so by introducing new synthetic complexes, which we then reflect on from various points of view. When the complexes survive and grow, that initial showing has been philosophically decisive.

I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I reflect, and out of all of this I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can. I shall not speak much for fear of saying foolish things; I will risk still less for fear of doing them, for I am not disposed to abuse the confidence which they have deigned to show me. Such is the conduct which until now I have followed and will follow.

… It is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.

Reason can be used only when looking critically back.

When I had been a film critic for ten minutes, I treated Doris Day as a target for cheap shots. I have learned enough to say today that the woman was remarkably gifted.

I wanted to write history rather than participate in it.

I've been in a lot of shows, I will say that. Every once in a while, I'll look at a tape of something I've done, and I won't even remember having done it.

You mine your own past in order to get to know yourself.

Let us hold our discussion together in our own persons, making trial of the truth and of ourselves.

'Tango' was a good experience, looking back on it, and it seems to hold up pretty well.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.

Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise theory becomes simply "blah, blah, blah, " and practice, pure activism.

To philosophize man must put his whole soul into play, in much the same manner that to run he must use his heart and lungs.