Quotes About Contemplation

I think it's good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone.

When I allowed myself to think about the brevity of the time ahead of me, and the futility of spending any more of it on cooking and mending and gardening, it frightened me so much that I almost couldn't breathe.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they're going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

Holy Week is a time to think about risk, because that's what this whole Passion narrative represents.

We said nothing for several minutes. Our minds weighed like ripened fruit on the branch. When one is confronted by the mirror, the spirit trembles.

Alicia en el mundo del espejo", pensé, más de una vez, contemplándome en él, desnuda y desolada con un gran deseo de atravesar su superficie, que parecía gelatinosa. Tristísima imagen aquella -la mía-, de ojos asustados, que era, tal vez, la imagen misma de la soledad.

He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.

The tension between "yes" and "no," between "I can" and "I cannot," makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.

The sadness of churches at night moves me; I feel in them the grandeur of nothingness.

That is what is most lacking in our people," she said, "they do not think.

Like mirror script, to read requires reflection, asks us to see ourselves holding the page.

La vie est lente et l'homme ne sait guère la jouer.

The eternal silence of infinite spaces reassures me.

Vorbele sunt oglinda gandurilor pe care le nutresti.

How can one make the best of one's life? By converting as wide a range of experience as possible into conscious thought.

What else can we do but garden our shadows while far away the universe burns and vanishes.

Quando abbiamo finito sono andato a fare una passeggiata da solo, fino alla collina che anni prima in un giorno di neve io e Guido avevamo risalito per contemplare il passaggio. Ho cercato il punto preciso in cui ci eravamo fermati e ho guardato in basso come avevamo fatto allora, ed era strano vedere una casa sola dove ce n'erano state due.

Lascia qui il rumore del mondo, per tornare al suono dei tuoi pensieri.

I know they say that's the way the cookie crumbles and all. But you can't help but wonder why there's any cookie-crumbling going on in the first place.

brutally air-conditioned library

Honestly, I didn't have the patience for biology or history in an academic sense, but I always liked the kind of big questions.

Andrew Burstein

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. ~Germaine Greer