Quotes About Contemplation

When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.

Unless you're fond of hollering you don't make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you're in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you're losing time.

I turn my head from side to side.

A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth.

You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn't see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.

You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time.

Waiting. For that missing seed crystal of thought that would suddenly solidify everything.

What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?

You don't have to go fishing, of course, to fix your motorcycle.

I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent.

You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.

It's all right," Phaedrus said. "We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from.

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.

I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way.

I wake up wondering if I know we're near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle.

All day while I've been thinking and talking about Phaedrus they must have been thinking about how bad all this is. That's what's really wearing them down. The thought.

I always feel like I'm in church when I do this…The

I break open a lunch of Swiss cheese, pepperoni and crackers. I cut up the cheese and then the pepperoni in careful, neat slices. The silence allows you to do each thing right.

Furthermore, as shown with neuroimaging, when contemplating mouthwash versus soap, those who had just spoken a lie activated parts of the sensorimotor cortex related to the mouth (i.e., the subjects were more aware of their mouths at the time); those who had written the lie activated the cortical regions mapping onto their hand.

The world seems almost physically wider when up to just now the right-hand side was always obscured by the proximity of someone else; and all of a sudden you stand there, astonished, in a wide semi-circle: alone.

Every day there comes a moment when a person lays his hands in his lap and all his busyness collapses like ashes. The work accomplished is, from the soul's point of view, entirely imaginary.