

To maintain wellbeing, individuals need to recognize their inner strengths.

All stress, anxiety, depression, is caused when we ignore who we are, and start living to please others. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. In short, reflection is an essential tool for anyone who wants to grow and thrive. Being able to be your true self is one of the strongest components of good mental health. Self-reflection is scary, but necessary for growth. So, with no further ado, let’s get started. Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. These self reflection quotes will inspire you and will provide you with the strength to understand yourself better. The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind. A healthy social life is found only when, in the mirror of each soul, the whole community finds its reflection, and when, in the whole community, the virtue of each one is living. But for Plath, the mirror doesn’t merely reflect: it somehow sees people, too. This is not some hall of mirrors at a fairground, which deliberately distorts faces and body shapes: whatever we see when we look in the mirror is what the mirror was accurately and faithfully ‘swallowed’. Try to take a closure look into yourself. You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. Every answer that you’re looking for about yourself, is already in you. In summary, the mirror tells us that it has ‘no preconceptions’: it is ‘exact’, with the implication that it simply shows us what it ‘sees’. Reflection quotes for Friday Develop success from failures. A poem, bordering on dramatic monologue, in which a mirror speaks to us, addressing the reader in a matter-of-fact tone, reflecting the flatness of its surface and its inability to do anything other than reflect back to us what it ‘sees’. In this short poem, she uses the image of a mirror at a party, throwing back at her the half-familiar sight of her own self, as a way of pondering the relationship between love and self-love. Jennings (1926-2001) deserves a wider readership than she currently enjoys. The shortest poem on this list, and a nice companion-piece to Plath’s.Įlizabeth Jennings, ‘ Mirrors’. Like Plath’s mirror poem below, this (altogether shorter) poem is spoken by the mirror itself, announcing that it stands between the spectator and their eyes and ‘collects no interest’.

Elizabeth Bishop, ‘ To Be Written on the Mirror in Whitewash’.
