Quotes about contemplation

I want to abolish time, especially in the contemplation of architecture.

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

Contemplation and wisdom are highest achievements and man is not totally at home with them.

He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age.

There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and music from the other rooms into a state of vague ecstasy, while he contemplated the small sheet of water outside the window. It was that happy frame of mind into which his people could project themselves so easily - the mere absence of immediate unpleasant preoccupation could start it off, and a landscape which included the sea, a river, a fountain, or anything that occupied the eye without engaging

Rarely if ever, moments come that are so defining in our lives. The years are glutted with benign matters which impact us more deeply than we could have ever imagined in our youth.

I’ve come to realize the power of reflection, the kind that comes only from contemplation. Synchronizing ourselves with the awe-inspiring environment around us is indeed a tremendous feat that, at some point or another, we must all undergo, alone yet together.

Let your home be you mast and not your anchor.

Many solemn nights Blond moon, we stand and marvel...Sleeping our noons away

What distinguishes - in both senses of that word - contemplation is rather this: it is a knowing which is inspired by love. "Without love there would be no contemplation." Contemplation is a loving attainment of awareness. It is intuition of the beloved object.

The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence.

Protests can sometimes, necessarily, simplify things.

I found myself speaking more slowly (in an attempt to obey the Bible in speech), as if I was speaking French instead of English.

When the last leaf falls,what will die within us?

As the sky prepares to settle its tired, aching feetinto the night’s velvet slippersI settle, into my armchair, soaking the teabag,of my thoughts, into warm liquidy stars.

My only stake was the hook I shot in the moon, trying to capture stardom on my way to heaven. Without bravado. Just footsteps plodding me along till my big show. My showstopper. The one where I landed in a place without gravity.

Wind is on fire" - beautiful words. What causes the fire, what enhances it, and what finally extinguishes it by itself or by bringing in rainclouds, gets identified with it. Do breath and life have the same relationship with each other!

Let us not fear our wild thoughts for they can give rise to wondrous contemplation, creative endeavour, life changing ideas, momentous bliss.

Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.

No one answer is ever the answer.

A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in--what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.

The greatest enemy of good thinking is busyness.

The trout fisher, like the landscape painter, haunts the loveliest places of the earth, and haunts them alone. Solitude and his own thoughts—he must be on the best terms with all of these; and he who can take kindly the largest allowance of these is likely to be the kindliest and truest with his fellow men.

Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreo

If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet...maybe we could understand something.

Life isn't memorable enough to remember everything. It's not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes.

His silence helps him come off as something of a seer, a whispering muse.

Seated here in contemplations lost, my thought discovers vaster space beyond, supernal silence and unfathomed peace

In some mystical way, Lenny seemed to ennoble work more than anyone I had ever met"Also in "Stories and Scripts:an Anthology

No reprimand in the mirrorSlow walk to LiberiaSlow dance across the SaharaSlow unraveling of gray matter

Self-contemplation is a curseThat makes an old confusion worse.

We gain knowledge about the interworking of our personal mind through observation of the external world and personal introspection. Contemplation requires a degree of stillness, the willingness to consider deep thoughts.

Every time that we consider our past, examine our present environment, and speculate about the future, we engage in mental projection. Contemplation merges into thinking, and thinking unspools into theorizing suppositions. Every act of attentiveness expands our state of awareness. Deductive surmises represent an ongoing process of making applicable connections between theories and facts. Devising working hypothesis represents one of the highest intellectual achievements of humankind.

Men believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe learned most of his practical knowledge – how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip – from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can see the desperation spread over such a man’s face as he listens to himself spea

I hear many people share with me that they just 'have to do this thing' before they can relax and slow down.The truth is that taking the time to be still and reflective actually increases productivity and gives more joy to what you're doing when it's time to take action again.

For what I am suggesting is that concern for the mysterious is at the heart of the humanities, whereas at the heart of the sciences there is a concern with the problematic. That this is a contrast, and not a dichotomy, is seen in the way in which problem-solving has a place in the humanities—though the most significant kind of problem is one that, in Marcel’s language, ‘conceals a mystery’—and in the complementary way in which some scientists, such as Einstein, have spoken of a deepening sense o

In the sweet territory of silence we touch the mystery. It's the place of reflection and contemplation, and it's the place where we can connect with the deep knowing, to the deep wisdom way.

Those 'back burner' thoughts, the ones the brain isn't quite sure about yet, may cook the slowest yet they often manage to be the tastiest when they come out.

Great ideas emerges from useless fragments of thoughts.

It was one of those days when I was thinking too much, too fast. Only it was more like the thoughts had a mind of their own and going all by themselves at a hundred miles a second, and I was just sitting back, feeling the growing paranoia inside of me.

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars... Anything is possible on a train...

Sadly enough, sometimes you and Lenny are the only real human interactions that I have all day. The rest of the day I'm just like a machine that mechnically computes and producesAlso in "Stories and Scripts:An Anthology

If I so much as dare to intimately probe the reflection I see in the mirror, I am filled with the tormenting fear that I might be repulsed. God invites us to boldly probe the reflection in the mirror so that we might be released.

The poor young man must work for his bread; he eats; when he has eaten, he has nothing left but reverie. He enters God's theater free; he sees the sky, space, the stars, the flowers, the children, the humanity in which he suffers, the creation in which he shines. He looks at humanity so much that he sees the soul, he looks at creation so much that he sees God. He dreams, he feels that he is great; he dreams some more, and he feels that he is tender. From the egotism of the suffering man, he pass

It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.

An individual excels where the institution fails.

To broaden one's prospective is to push back the swirling winds of ignorance.

Has modern society lost a measure of its spiritual awareness because we take so little time to walk? In not allowing ourselves time to slow down, to be close to the earth around us, have we become impervious to a God who chooses to reveal Himself through His creation?

Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was

John Hay calls the telegraph reporter, "the natural enemy of the scribe.

The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance, not one or the other, but always both at the same time.

Yearn to grow in the field of love and bliss not in the field of competition and contemplation.

Concentration is the creation of the instrument meditation is the right use of it contemplation transcends it.

I reserve the right to not to be addressed...at all my thoughts should not be interrupted with your words.

Importance is not in ‘discharge’ (of karmas) that occurs but it is in the contemplation (dhyan) within at that time in effect that is important.

Unavoidably, the life of contemplation is an everyday life, a life of fidelity in small matters, small services rendered in the spirit of warmth and love which lightens every burden. The sun’s brightness can from time to time (and perhaps often) be hidden in mist and cloud, but that is no reason for laying aside one’s daily work. Contemplation is work, and it goes on working even when the person praying derives no apparent satisfaction from it. Contemplation is a conversation in which I am at pa

It is impossible to contemplate the word without the serious intention of doing justice to it in practical behavior. It demands love for God and our neighbor, and does so with such immediacy and unmistakable urgency that it is pointless even to pause before this demand unless we are willing to respond.

Learn to listen to subtle cues from your spirit instead of the barrage coming from your brain.

Sometimes I need a place to ask myself impossible questions.

Prayer does not blind us to the world, but it transforms our vision of the world, and makes us see it, all men, and all the history of mankind, in the light of God. To pray 'in spirit and in truth' enables us to enter into contact with that infinite love, that inscrutable freedom which is at work behind the complexities and the intricacies of human existence. This does not mean fabricating for ourselves pious rationalizations to explain everything that happens. It involves no surreptitious manip

Meditation puts the telescope to the eye, and enables us to see Jesus after a better sort than we could have seen Him if we had lived in the days of His flesh.

Most of us think too much of speech, which is but the shell of thought.

There is a 'movement' of meditation, expressing the basic 'paschal' rhythm of the Christian life, the passage from death to life in Christ. Sometimes prayer, meditation and contemplation are 'death' - a kind of descent into our own nothingness, a recognition of helplessness, frustration, infidelity, confusion, ignorance. Note how common this theme is in the Psalms. If we need help in meditation we can turn to scriptural texts that express this profound distress of man in his nothingness and his

Whether you teach or live in the cloister or nurse the sick, whether you are in religion or out of it, married or single, no matter who you are or what you are, you are called to the summit of perfection: you are called to a deep interior life perhaps even to mystical prayer, and to pass the fruits of your contemplation on to others. And if you cannot do so by word, then by example.Yet if this sublime fire of infused love burns in your soul, it will inevitably send forth throughout the Church an

If you cannot recollect yourself continuously, do so once a day at least, in the morning or in the evening. In the morning make a resolution and in the evening examine yourself on what you have said this day, what you have done and thought, for in these things perhaps you have often offended God and those about you.

If you are religious, pray. If you are philosophical, contemplate. If you are spiritual, meditate.

. . . you must not build upon foundations of prayer and contemplation alone, for, unless you strive after the virtues and practice them, you will never grow to be more than dwarfs.

Light and Dark: each was unaware that the other existed.

Anytime you meditate, some electric jerks occur in your thigh...the symbol of premonition of an unpleasant event that has happened or will take place in future.

Christianity is more than just a belief; it is a life of discipline, a firm determination to live a life of prayer and contemplation, a life of self-denial and Christlikeness.

If you keep on saying a single thing to yourself, you are likely to attract it to yourself, dreaming it always, then in a twinkle of an eye, it comes to you.

To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.

Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.

I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book.

You can't memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it.

What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday.

Look at these cliffs! Some are abrupt and unpredictable. Some other are soft and with smooth slopes. Yet, they all have the same purpose: either to lure you and bring you down or to teach you how to stand up, firmly, on their rims while contemplating the horizon. Here, you have the perfect vision of the abyss beneath. the majesty of the skies above, or the endlessness of the horizon in front; but you can't see what's behind, and that's how it should be! What's the point in contemplating somethin

I no longer looked to the future or lost hope in it. The past and the future are, from the view of the present, nothing more than a distant paradise. As one who can never achieve divinity, all I could do is ponder that with all of my might.

No prince, no success filled her dreams: only time spread out before her to spend as she chose, a time of contemplation which offered her refuge.

For you to make your creative work creative, you must seek creativity from the creator.

Sitting to think of what to write will only set your ass on fire, give you headache, twist your face to look stupid, instead, walk around with a blank mind and something from somewhere will fill it up.

Texts are not "processed" as much as they are resurrected, and the image of reader and information processor or computer device, which often dominates current discussions of reading, seems less apt than another metaphor: the reader as necromancer.

My decision to become a teacher suddenly seemed even more appropriate. Life had just become that much more unpredictably precarious and ill-suited to long-term planning, and it felt that much more necessary to spread love and knowledge to those who would one day have to manage this messy and painful world of ours"Also in Zack Love's "Stories and Scripts: an Anthology

Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat?

I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was

In the city fields Contemplating cherry-trees...Strangers are like friends

In our spreading materialist wasteland, more and more people thirst for contemplation, including political wheel-dealers, tycoons, and military top brass, stressed out by the rigors of their professions. Are we to suppose that everyone doing deep breathing on a meditation pillow is communing with the God of Christians? Not necessarily. What unites us to God is the practice of love. If prayer, or any other religious act, is not grounded in that, it is an offense to God.

At some point in life every person encounters haunting feelings of loneliness, because the feeling of being alone and withdrawing deeply into the inner self is part of the human condition. A person might choose to countenance or even cultivate their loneliness and turn the poignant hours of unerring solitude into poetry of their soul.

At the same time all the houses round about promptly took part in this silence, and so did the darkness above them, reaching as far as the stars. And the footsteps of invisible passers-by, whose course I had no wish to guess at, the wind that kept on driving against the other side of the street, the gramophone singing behind closed windows in some room - they made themselves heard in this silence, as if they had owned it for ever and ever.

The contemplation of consciousness—which is the contemplation of no-thing whatsoever—is endlessly fascinating. It’s like staring at a candle in a dark night—you find yourself mesmerized by something that is unchanging yet infinitely compelling. You feel drawn into something you don’t understand rationally but that your heart or soul grasps completely. You are drawn into it, and as you are drawn into it, the only thing you experience as real is the eternal or timeless nature of Being itself. You

He captures memories because if he forgets them, it's as though they didn't happen.

Whenever the Christian idea of meditation is taken seriously, there are those who assume it is synonymous with the concept of meditation centered in Eastern religions. In reality, the two ideas stand worlds apart. Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to fill the mind. The two ideas are quite different.

An examined life, an enigmatic investigation of reality, is required in order for a person to realize a transcendent spiritual journey. A contemplative soul is bound to live life more intensely than someone whom is concerned exclusively with living an external existence.

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside.In such a way that they have the whole world as background.

It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.

Its amazing to contemplate what human mind is capable of, incredible functionality, specialty of describing something beautifully without even experiencing called the work of imagination, carries us to a world we have never been before.

Listening to music, reading literature, writing, and extended periods of personal introspection provide four prongs of the incitements available to form a conscious and subconscious designation of self. Other potential incentives that contribute to self-identity include religion and cultural events as well as painting, sculpture, dance, films, newspapers, television, Internet surfing, web sites, and online message boards.

I find it quite incredible how much peace and quiet a person actually needs in order to devote himself entirely to his thoughts.