Quotes About Contemplation

Peut-être, le temps passant, la question première : « D'où ça vient les enfants ? » laisse-t-elle la place à celle-ci : « D'où ça nous vient, nos pensées ? »

Sunday. I contemplate my books, piled up on the windowsill to constitute a small library: a rather useless one, for today no one will come to read them for me. Seneca, Zola, Chateaubriand, and Valery Larbaud are right there, three feet away, just out of reach. A very black fly settles on my nose. I waggle my head to unseat him. He digs in. Olympic wrestling is child's play compared to this. Sunday.

introduction, shaking his head.

Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)

Mirrors should reflect before sending an image.

I hope the amazed reader will be patient for a while—in order simply to read.

Jeanne Birdsall

Solitude helps you figure out where everybody else stops and you begin

I need, absolutely, to be alone.

put problems into perspective—they give you a means for standing back and getting a better view of a situation

I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

And yet that's the best way to watch television actively: with your eyes closed.

Lead us toward a speech, which is as beautiful as silence, and toward a silence, which is as beautiful as the sweetest and truest of words. (119)

What is harvested in the world is composed of four elements: water, earth, wind, and light. What God harvests is also composed of four elements: faith [pistis], hope [elpis], love [agap], and contemplation [gnosis]. Our earth is faith, for she gives us roots. Water is our hope, for it slakes our thirst. Wind [pneuma] is the love [agap] through which we grow; and light is the contemplation [gnosis] through which we ripen.

Who among us has never looked up into the heavens on a starlit night, lost in wonder at the vastness of space and the beauty of the stars?

Both In and Out of the Game   Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.   Walt Whitman

Here's all you need to know to become enlightened: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what's true until you know.

examination. "Sometimes

How many times in the last year have you gotten up before the sun makes its way over that distant eastern horizon and witnessed the actual dawning of a new day? It is illuminating. It is inspiring. It is breathtaking.

Jeff Goldblum

If you try to observe the world for long enough through the perfect lens, then one day it will surely settle permanently into place, and then every object is a still life. You live in the moments between blinks.

It didn't consume his every waking thought- that would be a sign of criminal insanity- but he figured he thought about it maybe a dozen or so times a day.

If you were me, which I am,

God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thoughts: there would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.