Quotes About Contemplation

I observe the world and the people surrounding me.

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.

After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.

I do suspect we are going to get signs of life elsewhere, but how well prepared are we for this? Have we thought how we will approach them? We need to start thinking about that.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

Ron allowed us to see right away the private piece of a person about to become very public. I suspect we're going to see more of her very private world - Laura's private experience. I'm not sure yet how public she's going to be about the actions she's going to have to take.

I swear to God, like, every day, the majority of my day is sentimental.

Writing is work. It takes a lot of contemplation, concentration, and out-and-out sweat. People tend to romanticize it, that somehow your work appears by benefit of some mystical external force. In reality, to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. It's work, and often it's hard work.

When I look up and see the sun shining on the patch of white clouds up in the blue, I begin to think how it would feel to be up somewhere above it winging swiftly thought the clear air, watching the earth below, and the men on it, no bigger than ants.

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

I don't ever want to get to the point where I don't think about death! You've got to swim in it, learn from it - embrace it!

A lot of the time, when I swim, I close my eyes because it is definitely lonely.

My life has two modes. One is sitting around writing and contemplating or building things. The other is execution mode. It takes a while to switch from one to the other.

Would I change anything? I don't know, that's a double edge sword for me.

You can go from object to object, from plant to plant, from animal to animal and regard them as symbols for the spiritual. In this way, you make your imaginative capacities fluid and release them from the sharp contours of sense perception.

Latins are predisposed to thinking about the past. Catholicism has a lot to do with it because Catholicism is a contemplation of the past, of symbols that are supposed to be eternally present.

For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.

Dad is looking at the bookshelves, deep in thought, deciding which book should go where. Once, Mom came home from work and discovered that he had turned all the books around so that the bindings were against the wall and the pages faced out. He said it was calming not to have all those words floating around and "creating static." Mom made him turn them back. She said it was too hard to find a book when she couldn't read the titles. Then she poured herself a big glass of wine.

Life was anything but fast, in your opinion. If it went any more slowly, time would probably start to run backward.

Pray about it before you talk about it,' Drew replied. 'Maybe I should try.' 'No maybes about it.

She returned to her slow dance with the waves.

As the bee knows how to find honey in flowers, the gift of wisdom draws lessons of divine goodness from everything.

It is the purification of the intellect which prepares for contemplation.