Quotes About Contemplation

As Richard Foster explains, "Though silence sometimes involves the absence of speech, it always involves the act of listening. Simply to refrain from talking, without a heart listening to God, is not silence."1

In the quiet of those brief hours, listen to the thunder of God's silence.

Solitude is both a "vacation with God" and a "furnace of transformation." "The

This form of meditation is best accomplished with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other!

accept the Word of Scripture and ponder it in your heart, as Mary did. That is all. That is meditation." —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Way to Freedom5

If we hope to move beyond the superficialities of our culture, including our religious culture, we must be willing to go down into the recreating silences, into the inner world of contemplation.

Our own spiritual formation will be strengthened if, in our busy, crowded, and noisy lives, we find regular times and places for quiet, for prayer, for listening to God. Time alone with God gives us renewed energy to live fully engaged with the world again. Do

We are silent after hearing the Word because the Word is still speaking and dwelling within us. We are silent at the beginning of the day because God should have the first word, and we are silent before going to sleep because the last word also belongs to God." —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together 6

remember these practices earn us nothing in the economy of God. Nothing. Their only purpose is to place us before God. That is all.

Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification. One

Bonhoeffer writes, "Real silence, real stillness, really holding one's tongue comes only as the sober consequence of spiritual stillness."6

The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.

Whenever the Christian idea of meditation is taken seriously, there are those who assume it is synonymous with the concept of meditation centered in Eastern religions. In reality, the two ideas stand worlds apart. Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to fill the mind. The two ideas are quite different.

Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification.

Thinking is the hardest work we can do, and among the most important

stars that turn slowly off each dawn so that we begin to see how many things can go on living without us, — Richard Jackson, from "Triptych," Broken Horizons: Poems (Press 53, 2018)

I lay still for a while, picking up the scattered garments of my mind and trying to assemble some kind of reasonable outfit from them.

Never mind what you feel. Think. Watch. Think again. And then one step at a time to put things right. As a mason puts one block at a time. To build solid and good. So with thought. Think. Build one thought at a time. Think solid. Then act. Is it?

He did not have a particularly ruminative or philosophical bent—or at least he didn't think of himself in those terms. Perhaps, working day after day in a world of violence and blood and death, it was impossible not to grow philosophical with the passage of years. Maybe most other homicide cops spent a lot of time contemplating the dark side of human potential; maybe he wasn't the only one; he had no way of knowing; it wasn't the kind of thing most cops talked about.

I drifted just outside, contemplating the dark interior.

I think about dying. I've come to realize we all die alone in one way or another.

In recognition that any good idea is a fragile thing, you have to give it a few minutes to breath—like a good red wine.

Even when I look away I am still looking.

You wonder what he's thinking when he shivers like that.