Quotes About Contemplation

There he lived in solitary grandeur, eating and sleeping alone (and these were his principal occupations), and communing with his own dignity

I don the robe of hermit without a cry.

I looked at all the people, feeling sorry for them. They were still subordinate to clock and calendar. Absolved of that, I stood becalmed.

The red hands had stopped at four-twenty-seven. He wondered what day they had stopped. As he descended the stairs with his armful of books, he wondered at just what moment the clock stopped. Had it been morning or night? Was it raining or shining? Was anyone there when it stopped?

And it does occur to me that, as I sit here in no pain at all, some not inconsiderable number of my contemporaries are suffering every bit as much pain as any cave painter suffered, and asking themselves exactly what principle it is by which a long life is thought better than a short life.

If we think only the thoughts that are customary to us, and listen only to the words of those who are of our mind, we are little likely to find refreshment and renewal in our minds, and thus all too likely to suppose that we have come to the end of all deliberations that we have to make.

Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. —RACHEL CARSON

An old man, I want only peace. The things of this world mean nothing. I know no good way to live and I can't stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt. The mountain moon lights me as I play my lute.

I felt us traveling on a small craft, piloting through the capital city of the reigning global superpower on the coast of the third largest continent of a smallish, rocky world near the inner rim of the habitable zone of a G-type dwarf star that lay a quarter of the way out to the edge of a dense, large, barred, spiral galaxy that drifted through a thinly spread local cluster in the dead center of the entire universe.

He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise.

Someday we'll learn again how to train on this living place, and holding still will be like flying.

The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she'll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.

Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

The question stops the man, as simple ones sometimes do. He stands lost in the universe's weeds, hunched a little from the stronger gravity of the world he visits.

he reads the same paragraph a dozen times; the words turn into twirling things, like winged seeds spinning in the air.

You can travel everywhere, just by standing still.

He stands lost in the universe's weeds, hunched a little from the stronger gravity of the world he visits.

Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in.

listen to what other people called silence

the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.