Quotes About Contemplation

In a letter thanking Pamela for the chart, Jarvis wrote, "People on the yard saw what I was doing, and they looked up, too. They passed the chart around and asked questions. I looked around and saw men from one side of the yard to the other all looking up to the sky. One of the rarest spectacles I've ever seen. Then I look over at the guards in the gun towers—they were looking up, too. Everyone just looking into the sky.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

propel them backward, not forward, to reflect on what their lives have meant—to themselves, their loved ones, and the world at large.

Try pausing right before and right after undertaking a new action, even something simple like putting a key in a lock to open a door. Such pauses take a brief moment, yet they have the effect of decompressing time and centering you.

Monastic contemplatives have staked out a clearly limited area to be transformed by contemplation: the monastery. Lay contemplatives face the challenge of transforming the whole world.

Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.... We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little by stepping back from the noise.

As Jack listened at the top of the stairs, a tear welled in his eye, and rolled very slowly down his cheek. 8

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

We might at first label the body's simple need to focus inward depression. But as we practice going inward, we come to realize that much of it is not depression in the least; it is a cry for something else, often the physical body's simple need for rest, for contemplation, and for a kind of forgotten courage, one difficult to hear, demanding not a raise, but another life.

Walking the roads is enough today, I'll follow the dark line of receding sun

Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

In the contemplative Christian tradition, to be humiliated is to be returned to the ground of your being.

You have a moment in the day, as Blake said, that Satan (the strategic mind, worried about being 'productive') cannot find.

It would have been a good occasion to smoke a pipe had I owned one and had I been forty years older.

I collect. Though I guess that wording would imply that I seek this stuff out; I actually meant "collect" in the way that dead bugs "collect" on your windshield.

Sometimes I need a place to ask myself impossible questions.

I wanted silence in the flowers, not to not say, but to not have the impulse of saying.]

Time to silence the Hegelian Dialect

After all, I might not intend to use him for a plaything, but I could still appreciate looking through the toy-shop window.

Of course, he was absolutely correct, it was no concern of mine. So naturally I thought about it--excessively.

whilst I reboarded my train of thought.

He paused again, letting his words settle like stones falling to the bottom of a pond.

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.'" "A