Quotes About Contemplation

Their types were familiar enough to Ralph, who had taken their measure in former wanderings, and come across their duplicates in every scene of continental idleness.

Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of Lily's beauty. She studied it with a kind of passion, as though it were some weapon she had slowly fashioned for her vengeance.

and strolled into the other room.

even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion.

The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface. [Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air]

We are so used to "doing" that it may seem like a chore just to "be.

LOOK NOW, IN YOUR IGNORANCE, ON THE FACE OF DEATH.

Conversation enriches the understanding, but the school of genius is solitude.

What obsesses me more than anything in the world . . . is why some things happen and why other things don't. It doesn't seem to me there is any logic, any way of . . . you know . . .

I think if you have to think about anything very long, you've obviously done yourself an injury, as it were.

Slowly the silent bird turned its head. It could do so, if it chose, through more than three hundred and sixty degrees.

but there was no need. For at that

Lying on a pile of pillows and smaller cushions, slurping her coffee and playing with her cigarette smoke, she felt briefly that her thoughts were growing more subtle and expansive.

She tried to walk more slowly up the hill. God, her mind was racing, racing in neutral

As Anne watched her, she could not help thinking of the age-old question every woman asks herself at some time or other: do I have to swallow it?

But that's what the English mean, isn't it, when they say, He was very philosophical about it? They mean that someone stopped thinking about something.

Just before the top of the hill she stopped, breathed deeply, and tried to muster her scattered sense of calm, like a bride checking her veil in the last mirror before the aisle.

The mess that's emerging...at least reflects the truth of my experience, the fact that every contemplation is interrupted, and that every interruption becomes further object of contemplation, and that this rhythm of delusion and revelation feels as if it's essential to the nature of consciousness considering itself.

What state? A state of philosophical enquiry? I thought you would approve.

David listened to the swishing sound his yellow slippers made as he walked up the last flight of steps to the door that led from the terrace into the drawing room. Yvette had not yet opened the curtains, which saved him the trouble of closing them again. He liked the drawing room to look dim and valuable.

Ease and enjoyment must not be the end of Christian retirement, but penance, labor, and assiduous contemplation; without great fervor and constancy in which, close solitude is the road to perdition.

As much as the heavens exceed the earth, so much larger is the field of spiritual meditation than that of all terrestrial concerns.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.