Quotes About Contemplation

She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her.

Avoid the crowd, avoid mass audiences, keep your own counsel, which is the counsel of philosophy--of wisdom you can acquire and make your own.

Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.

Reflective I found a weed that had a mirror in it and that mirror looked in at a mirror in me that had a weed in it

I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished: I hold it in me like a pregnancy or as on my lap a child not to grow or grow old but dwell on

It occurred to me that soon I would need a scroll of butcher paper and a felt-tip pen to record the list of completely senseless things comprising my life. I would tape the scroll to the wall and conduct a focus group of one.

I appreciate not being interrupted in the middle of thinking about nothing.

You can appreciate things at four in the morning that would go right past you during the day.

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.

In our own lives the voice of God speaks slowly, a syllable at a time. Reaching the peak of years, dispelling some of our intimate illusions and learning how to spell the meaning of life-experiences backwards, some of us discover how the scattered syllables form a single phrase.

Happy is he who is aware of the mysteries of his Lord.

Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.

A moment of insight is a fortune, transporting us beyond the confines of measured time.

The Sabbath is holiness in time.

The Bible is to be understood by the spirit that grows with it, wrestles with it, and prays with it.

There are three starting points of contemplation about God; three trails that lead to Him. The first is the way of sensing the presence of God in the world, in things;9 the second is the way of sensing His presence in the Bible; the third is the way of sensing His presence in sacred deeds.

He who wishes to ponder what is beyond the Bible must first learn to be sensitive to what is within the Bible.

Two sources of religious thinking are given us: memory (tradition) and personal insight. We must rely on our memory and we must strive for fresh insight.

The role of religion is to be a challenge to philosophy, not merely an object for examination.

He had no need to push the everyday world away from him. He just stepped out of it whenever he wished.

A snow-capped mountain in Switzerland, seen from the comfort of an cabin, can set off a profound chain of thought about ice and ancient history; a gentle snow in the Paris suburbs can create images that show the transience of beauty. The winter window has two sides, one for the watcher and one for the white drifts, and the experience of winter is often not one or the other but both at once.

Pause for a moment and a place will pool out around you, not as an illusion but as a fact, in details it would not have had if you had not stopped to look.