Quotes About Contemplation

Jennifer, I asked, what do you ever do besides read? She looked up at the sky and sighed and said very seriously, I think.

I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow.

I entered my reading the way an echo enters a sound.

Look at a tree, a plant. How still they are, how deeply rooted in being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.

Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruck by the absolute stillness and inconceivable vastness of

Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.

You cannot pay attention to silence without simultaneously becoming still within. Silence without, stillness within.

and also with sufficient good judgment to appreciate that while he might enjoy the contemplation of his superiority to the masses, there was little likelihood of the masses being equally entranced by the same cause.

pulled my jacket tighter

A silly man lies awake all night, Thinking of many things. When the morning comes he is worn with care, And his trouble is just as it was.

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

At first, after her conversion she thought she would have to renounce all that was secular and live totally immersed in God, but then she realized that, even in the contemplative life, you cannot sever all connection with the world, that the deeper you are drawn into God, the more you must go out of yourself to the world in order to carry the divine life into it.

So he writes for contemplative souls, and at a very particular point along their way he wants to take them by the hand, at a crossroad where most halt, perplexed, not knowing how to proceed.

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars

Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny.

Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations?

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

She sat silent, and the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet.

He pocketed his watch with a milder look, and began to turn about busily in the empty shell of his own mind. His universe was a brilliantly illuminated circle extending from himself at it's centre to the exact limit of his occupations and interests.

In the thick of this meditation Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a stranger