Quotes About Contemplation

Once more she had that really rather disgusting suspicion that her life till now had not only been loud but empty.

I's lonely to stay inside oneself.

How good it is to look sometimes across great spaces, to lift one's eyes from narrowness, to feel the large silence that rests on lonely hills!

and everybody will have what they never yet have had, a certain amount of that priceless boon, leisure-- leisure to sit down and look at themselves, and inquire what it is they really mean, and really want, and really intend to do with their lives.

What a place for him who intends to pass an examination, to write a book, or who wants the crumples got by crushing together too long with his fellows to be smoothed out of his soul.

But while admiring my neighbour, I don't think I shall ever try to follow in her steps, my talents not being of the energetic and organising variety, but rather that of that order which makes their owner almost lamentably prone to take up a volume of poetry and wander out to where the kingcups grow, and, sitting on a willow trunk beside a little stream, forget the very existence of everything but green pastures and still waters, and the glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields.

May 2nd.—Last night after dinner, when we were in the garden, I said, I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls they will be told that I am out, or away, or sick.

Put out? My dear Gertrud, I have been thinking of very serious things. You cannot expect me to frolic along paths of thought that lead to mighty and unpleasant truths. Why should I always smile? I am not a Cheshire cat.

oh, wide and splendid world! How good it is to look sometimes across great spaces, to lift one's eyes from narrowness, to feel the large silence that rests on lonely hills!

Sitting there in the dark, I felt very small, and solitary, and defenceless, alone in a great, big, black world.

I sit there in my bed staring at the wall, feeling happy, enjoying the way the wall looks, how pink and how white it is. Pink and white, as far as I'm concerned, have never looked quite so pink and white before.

When you truly understand one thing—a hawk, a juniper tree, a rock—you will begin to understand everything.

Say your prayers, think quietly what you should do, do it, and sleep. There is no man living, neither king nor emperor, can do more or better, or trust in a better harvest.

He prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands

Brother Cadfael was standing in the middle of his walled herb-garden, looking pensively

more impenetrable solitudes

We believe that the applause of silence is the only kind that counts.

Yet it puzzled me that no one around me seemed to take God very seriously. We neither believed nor disbelieved. He was our oldest habit.

A still small voice spake unto me,"Thou art so full of misery,Were it not better not to be?"

Flower in the crannied wall,I pluck you out of the crannies,I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,Little flower—but if I could understandWhat you are, root and all, and all in all,I should know what God and man is.

Here at the quiet limit of the world.

Her eyes are homes of silent prayers.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.