Images In Mirror Quotes

For instance, suppose you offer somebody a choice: They can flip a coin to win $200 for heads and nothing for tails, or they can skip the toss and collect $100 immediately. Most people, researchers have found, will take the sure thing. Now alter the game: They can flip a coin to lose $200 for heads and nothing for tails, or they can skip the toss and pay $100 immediately. Most people will take the gamble. To the imagined rational man, the two games are mirror images; the choice to gamble or not should be the same in both. But to a real, irrational man, who feels differently about loss than gain, the two games are very different. The outcomes are different, and sublimely irrational. ~ Benoit B Mandelbrot

Often, people build stories in their mind which have no basis in the contours of reality. Those which build these images, are building such images which are based on their relatively limited sense of understanding about the particular subject or person. This is a "fill in the blank" reality, which often manifests itself into the hearts and the minds of those who have a "fill in the blank" mindset, not the person with the here said reality.
The universe is designed in a way that reflects itself, just like a mirror, showing you exactly who you are to yourself, not who others are. Your largest and most concealed insecurities have their way of presenting themselves to you in a fashion that is relative to your self designed way of communication.
This short writing is a reminder that your preconceived notions on a particular subject or person, are a construct of your inner mind and emotional-relational well being and not of others. This is one of the largest fundamental truths in which you must have large insight to carefully watch who and what you massacre with your personal thoughts.
Having a keen sense of control on this subject will lead you to enlightenment in many platforms of life. ~ Will Barnes

The idea of love walked along the water and her gaze was full of absence and her eyes spat lighting. The impressionable evening received by turns the imprints of grasses, clouds, bodies, and wore crazy astronomical designs. The idea of love walked straight ahead without seeing anything; she was wearing tiny isosceles mirrors whose perfect assemblage was amazing. They were so many images of fish tails, when, by their angelic nature, they answer the promise one might make of always finding each other again. Finding each other again even in the depths of a forest, where the thread of a star is an articulation more silent than life, the dawn a liquor stronger than blood. Who is lost, who truly wanders off when a cup of coffee is steaming in the fog and waiters dressed in snow circulate patiently on the surface of floors whose desired height can be indicated with one's hands? Who? A solitary man whom the idea of love has just left and who tucks in his spirit like an imaginary bed. The man falls all the same and in the next room, under the moon-white verandah, a woman rises whom the idea of love has abandoned. The gravel weeps outside, a rain of glass is falling in which we recognize small chains, tears in which we have time to see ourselves, mirror tears, shards of windows, singular crystals like the ones we witness in our hand on awakening, leaves and the faded petals of those roses that once embelished certain distillery bottles. It's just that the idea of love, it seems angry w ~ Andre Breton

Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty, it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness. ~ Maeve Brennan

For Calvin, the creation reflects its Creator at every point. Image after images flashed in front of our eyes, as Calvin attempts to convey the multiplicity of ways in which the creation witnesses to its Creator: it is like a visible garment, which the invisible God dons in order to make himself known; it is like a book in which the name on the Creator is written as its author; it is like a theater, in which the glory of God is publicly displayed; it is like a mirror, in which the works and wisdom of God are reflected. ~ Alister E. McGrath

It is not the job of art to mirror. Images reflected in a mirror appear to us in reverse. An artist's responsibility is to reveal consciousness; to produce a human document. ~ Squeak Carnwath

Love at first sight is a hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned, "paralysed" as Menon was by Socrates, the model of loved objects, of captivating images, or again converted by an apparition, nothing distinguishing the path of enamoration from the Road to Damascus; subsequently ensnared, held fast, immobilised, nose stuck to the image (the mirror). In that moment when the other's image comes to ravish me for the first time, I am nothing more than the Jesuit Athanasius Kirchner's wonderful Hen: feet tied, the hen went to sleep with her eyes fixed on the chalk line, which was traced not far from her beak; when she was untied, she remained motionless, fascinated, "submitting to her vanquisher," as the Jesuit says (1646); yet, to waken her from her enchantment, to break off the violence of her Image-repertoire (vehemens animalis imaginatio), it was enough to tap her on the wing; she shook herself and began pecking in the dust again. ~ Roland Barthes

The earliest discovery of Pasteur, and for him the most exciting in all his life, was the asymmetry of molecules as a specific characteristic of living organisms-in other words, the fact that the molecules of living matter come in two varieties which, though chemically identical, are in their spatial structure like mirror images to each other-or like right and left gloves. 'Left-handed' molecules rotate polarized light to the left, 'right-handed' molecules to the right; life substances are thus 'optically active'. Why this should be so we still do not quite know; but it remains a challenging fact that 'no other chemical characteristic is as distinctive of living organisms as is optical activity'. ~ Arthur Koestler

One woman sent me on a letter written to her by her daughter, and the young girl's words are a remarkable statement about artistic creation as an infinitely versatile and subtle form of communication:
'...How many words does a person know?' she asks her mother. 'How many does he use in his everyday vocabulary? One hundred, two, three? We wrap our feelings up in words, try to express in words sorrow and joy and any sort of emotion, the very things that can't in fact be expressed. Romeo uttered beautiful words to Juliet, vivid, expressive words, but they surely didn't say even half of what made his heart feel as if it was ready to jump out of his chest, and stopped him breathing, and made Juliet forget everything except her love?
There's another kind of language, another form of communication: by means of feeling, and images. That is the contact that stops people being separated from each other, that brings down barriers. Will, feeling, emotion - these remove obstacles from between people who otherwise stand on opposite sides of a mirror, on opposite sides of a door.. The frames of the screen move out, and the world which used to be partitioned off comes into us, becomes something real... And this doesn't happen through little Audrey, it's Tarkovsky himself addressing the audience directly, as they sit on the other side of the screen. There's no death, there is immortality. Time is one and undivided, as it says in one of the poems. "At the table are great-grandfathers ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

The Angles Of The Frame
1
Many years have passed since the day,
I looked into a mirror, saw a wrinkled face.
I've been disclosed to the bulging sands of my bed.

2
Aeons of breath account for the many veins in my atrium.

3
The bull I breast-fed for many years
And I've submerged into the frame.

4
I knew the justifications were hard,
Hard as against the current of water.
No news from the ambiguous points
something uncommon.
It can't be justified by natural rules,
many years we've been tangled on it.

5
This usurped land is a part of all buried treasure islands
No finger points in any direction.
Lost in the dead-end alleys
Tracing images without a compass.

6
Horse pounding pulse sing endlessly in my blood.
My kinsmen of horses…
Blood-line linked as to rays of a circle
like roots of a tree growing deep on the roof.

7
You can't stop the hands of the clock.
You can't come back to the broken minutes.
The days have been arranged one after another.
The knights have left the game one after another.

8
There was a straw mat where you fell asleep.
I became numb, quite used to the stillness of the house.

9
Was something supposed to get away from the core
to join us?
A century has passed and we still live in this house.


10
Dimensions hav ~ Rosa Jamali

Adam saw those brown
eyes widen, the pouty lips soften, and then they were kissing. Gaston's mouth
was pliable and submissive under his. Adam was enamored by the taste of those
lips as he deepened the kiss and their tongues touched. Then without warning,
Adam was thrown back. His whole body warmed to the point of sweating, and in
his mind's eye he traveled through the dark forest, into the castle ruins and
to that magical mirror. The images swirled faster and faster until the glass
cracked. It splintered halfway through the mirror, and then the entire object
burst into a thousand glittering pieces. Adam was thrust back into his body and
stared up at Gaston's worried expression.
"What the bloody hell was that?"
"True love's kiss…" Adam whispered. Belle hadn't broken the curse on the mirror, so that's why it still worked, but Gaston had
just freed Adam. He felt the lingering anger and abilities of the beast falling
away. His fingers uncurled as if the claws had been ripped out from his
fingers. That urge to hunt and rip things apart dissolved. Adam felt … human.
The curse was truly broken. Adam could find a real happy ending in Gaston's
arms now that the beast was gone. ~ James Cox

When you become vulnerable, any ideal or perfect image of yourself falls away. (...)

Many people are addicted to perfection, and in their pursuit of the ideal, they have no patience with vulnerability. (...)

Every poet would like to write the ideal poem. Though they never achieve this, sometimes it glimmers through their best work. Ironically, the very beyondness of the idea is often the touch of presence that renders the work luminous. The beauty of the ideal awakens a passion and urgency that brings out the best in the person and calls forth the dream of excellence.

The beauty of the true ideal is its hospitality towards woundedness, weakness, failure and fall-back. Yet so many people are infected with the virus of perfection. They cannot rest; they allow themselves no ease until they come close to the cleansed domain of perfection. This false notion of perfection does damage and puts their lives under great strain. It is a wonderful day in a life when one is finally able to stand before the long, deep mirror of one's own reflection and view oneself with appreciation, acceptance, and forgiveness. On that day one breaks through the falsity of images and expectations which have blinded one's spirit. One can only learn to see who one is when one learns to view oneself with the most intimate and forgiving compassion. ~ John O'Donohue

(P)eople live their whole lives shut in by walls. Reality stands before them, yet they do not see it, because what you call real is just the image of your expectations. Your project the same images everywhere you go. They blind you; they keep you chained to the past, but your greatest fear is that one day the mirror will show you reality. ~ Deepak Chopra

I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she's four or five hundred pounds but she doesn't see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore, I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do. ~ Andy Warhol

On that lonely road they looked like mirror images of each other. Perhaps each of them thought of real communication as unnecessary, words divide by multiplying, what was certain was the oneness underneath the words. But now they refrain from talking because it might reveal to them how dangerously unlike one another they are. An image in a mirror is a reversal, the reflection and the original are joined but might cancel each other out. ~ Damon Galgut

Letter to Myself, in Remission, from Myself, Terminal"

You'll come to hate your own poems,
read them as pretty wisps of colorful thinking,
all those images just a splash of colored oil
sloshed over a pool gone rancid. Admit it.
Atheists always scared you. And no wonder.
Those nights you switched on the fan so no one
could hear you scream into your pillow, weeping
and biting your own hands like a motherless
monkey,banded to a body that despised you,
a suit of coals with a jammed-shut zipper.
Instead of the truth, you took refuge in stories
and souls, wore the word survivor like a pink nimbus.
All the while, my dear, I waited, knowing
you'd catch up to me one day. I'm holding the black-
backed mirror to your face. Look into it. ~ Anya Krugovoy Silver

White Hot Concentration is the unappreciated fruit of hard ligting, especially squats. When your in the squat rack, with a serious amount of weight overhead, your life literally depends on maintaining concentration. You learn to block out the swirling images in the mirror, the obnoxious chatter of the people next to you, the fat drop of sweat running down your nose. Once you've mastered this concentration in the weight room, duplicating it on the race course is relatively easy. Champions have only a few things in common. One weapon they all possess is White Hot Concentration. ~ Brad Alan Lewis

I have never sought the unexpected, the novelty, the extraordinary, but rather what is most typical of our daily life ... I go out to find people who resemble me, and the mirror which these images offer them is the same as that in which I see myself. ~ Willy Ronis

Emptying Town"

I want to erase your footprints
from my walls. Each pillow
is thick with your reasons. Omens

fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman
in a party hat, clinging
to a tin-foil balloon. Shadows

creep slowly across the tar, someone yells, "Stop!"
and I close my eyes. I can't watch

as this town slowly empties, leaving me
strung between bon-voyages, like so many clothes
on a line, the white handkerchief

stuck in my throat. You know the way Jesus

rips open his shirt
to show us his heart, all flaming and thorny,
the way he points to it. I'm afraid

the way I'll miss you will be this obvious.

I have a friend who everyone warns me
is dangerous, he hides
bloody images of Jesus
around my house, for me to find

when I come home; Jesus
behind the cupboard door, Jesus tucked

into the mirror. He wants to save me
but we disagree from what. My version of hell
is someone ripping open his shirt

and saying, Look what I did for you. ~ Nick Flynn

The day drags through though storms keep out the sun;
And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on:
Even as a broken mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies; and makes
A thousand images of one that was,
The same, and still the more, the more it breaks;
And thus the heart will do which not forsakes,
Living in shattered guise, and still, and cold,
And bloodless, with its sleepless sorrow aches,
Yet withers on till all without is old,
Showing no visible sign, for such things are untold. ~ George Gordon Byron

Ours has been called a culture of narcissism. The label is apt but can be misleading. It reads colloquially as selfishness and self-absorption. But these images do not capture the anxiety behind our search for mirrors. We are insecure in our understanding of ourselves, and this insecurity breeds a new preoccupation with the question of who we are. We search for ways to see ourselves. The computer is a new mirror, the first psychological machine. Beyond its nature as an analytical engine lies its second nature as an evocative object. ~ Sherry Turkle

The Coach's head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes - they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach's only distinctive feature - for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon's beak. This snout - or beak, rather - was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man's face, it almost appeared - due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue - that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another.

'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and ~ Ashim Shanker

Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in afterlife the images first presented to it. The first thing continues forever with the child. The first joy, the first sorrow, the first success, the first failure, the first achievement, the first misadventure, paint the foreground of his life. ~ Samuel Smiles

Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband's orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she didn't make…. Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on - how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible…. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Ophüls's images are perfect crystals. Their facets are oblique mirrors…And the mirrors are not content with reflecting the actual image, but constitute the prism, the lens where the split image constantly runs after itself to connect up with itself…On the track or in the crystal, the imprisoned characters bustle, acting and acted on…Crystalline perfection lets no outside subsist: there is no outside of the mirror or the film set, but only an obverse where the characters who disappear or die go, abandoned by life which thrusts itself back into the film set. ~ Gilles Deleuze

He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietzsche.)
A vain person is always vain about something. He overestimates the importance of some quality or exaggerates the degree to which he possesses it, but the quality has some real importance and he does possess it to some degree. The fantasy of overestimation or exaggeration makes the vain person comic, but the fact that he cannot be vain about nothing makes his vanity a venial sin, because it is always open to correction by appeal to objective fact.

A proud person, on the other hand, is not proud of anything, he is proud, he exists proudly. Pride is neither comic nor venial, but the most mortal of all sins because, lacking any basis in concrete particulars, it is both incorrigible and absolute: one cannot be more or less proud, only proud or humble.

Thus, if a painter tries to portray the Seven Deadly Sins, his experience will furnish him readily enough with images symbolic of Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Anger, Avarice, and Envy, for all these are qualities of a person's relations to others and the world, but no experience can provide an image of Pride, for the relation it qualifies is the subjective relation of a person to himself. In the seventh frame, therefore, the painter can only place, in lieu of a canvas, a mirror. ~ W.H. Auden

But I never looked like that!' - How do you know? What is the 'you' you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images. ~ Roland Barthes

With Catty and Patrick's images in he side mirror waving from the steps of that house like Jethro and Ellie Mae, it occurred to me that something extraordinary had happened. I had effortlessly found a place of acceptance
a place where people had taken me for me, not for what I could give them
and I had left it. ~ Linda Leigh Hargrove

But beyond the mind, beyond our thoughts, there is something we call the 'nature of the mind', the mind's true condition, which is beyond all limits. If it is beyond the mind, though, how can we approach an understanding of it?
Let's take the example of a mirror. When we look into a mirror we see in it the reflected images of any objects that are in front of it; we don't see the nature of the mirror. But what do we mean by this 'nature of the mirror'? We mean its capacity to reflect, definable as its clarity, its purity, and its limpidity, which are indispensable conditions for the manifestation of reflections. This 'nature of the mirror' is not something visible, and the only way we can conceive of it is through the images reflected in the mirror. In the same way, we only know and have concrete experience of that which is relative to our condition of body, voice, and mind. But this itself is the way to understand their true nature. ~ Namkhai Norbu

The pure heart is a spotless mirror in which images of infinite beauty are reflected. ~ Rumi

You know I understand how you feel.... the loneliness that sets in....how empty your heart aches wishing you had someone near....to hold... to kiss and love. That type of passion poets write about...that person your souls yearns yet can not find....that love that all time will lie down and be still for.... but at last it feels ever more like a cruel joke and fickle fate which has no plans of happiness....we drudge on with our existence trying to make sense of it....then slowly you feel the light dim....till it blows out. You've set yourself in complete darkness, with no direction, fully immersing yourself in confusion, doubt and suffer. Feeding your starving desires with delusions; completely disabling your inner mind from seeing the ugly truth beyond the shattered reality. You look at yourself through a contaminated mirror, seeing what you want to see from a certain angle, completely ignoring the faults and imperfections hidden under the surface. I petty the day that will wash your fickle images, scattering your true colors to yourself not more... As I see through what you choose to hide. ~ N2