Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it

The mirror is a worthless invention. The only way to truly see yourself is in the reflection of someone else's eyes.

Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.'
To live alone?'
To live. With what you are.

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?

Looking at yourself in a mirror isn't exactly a study of life.

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

G. C. Lichtenberg said a book is like a mirror: If a jerk looks in, a jerk looks out.

"The best change you can make is to hold up a mirror so that people can look into it and change themselves. That's the only way a person can be changed."
By looking into yourself," Zia said. "Even if you have to look into a mirror that's outside yourself to do it."
"And you know," Maida added. "That mirror can be a story you hear, or just someone else's eyes. Anything that reflects back so you can see yourself in it.

Every man carries within him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

A parlor game for a wet afternoon – imaging the mirrors of one’s friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever one looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace.

He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often — he searched for a simile, found one in his work — torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

The painter does not conceive himself as existing in himself, he conceives himself as a reflection of the objects he has put into his pictures and he lives in the reflections of his pictures, a writer, a serious writer, conceives himself as existing by and in himself, he does not at all live in the reflection of his books, to write he must first of all exist in himself, but for a painter to be able to paint, the painting must first of all be done.

When we are thrust out into the world just as we are, we first have to identify with that particular throw of the dice, with that accident organized by the divine computer: to get over our surprise that precisely this (what we see facing us in the mirror) is our self. Without the faith that our face expresses our self, without that basic illusion, that arch-illusion, we can not live or at least we cannot take life seriously. And it isn‘t enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way we can regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted