Quotes About Contemplation

Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

Crucial insights that we need to convey to ourselves can often be received only at night, like city church bells that have to wait until dark to be heard. During

Instead of bringing back sixteen thousand new plant species, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts.

A few moments in the countryside overlooking a valley could number among the most significant and useful of one's life, and be as worthy of precise remembrance as a birthday or a wedding.

Journeys are the midwives of thought.

It is the task of philosophy to let you down gently.

When he dipped his cake in his tea - a disgusting business - the whole of his life came back to him. When I did it nothing happened.

nine years earlier. Life was still

Without going outside, you may know the whole world. Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven. The farther you go, the less you know. Thus the wise know without traveling; See without looking; Work without doing.

Hux refused to pace, regarding it as a waste of energy.

I talk to myself," he had once explained to his minder. "I have conversations with myself. I debate with myself." He remembered smiling. "Sometimes I even win the arguments.

Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk.

I was applying myself to the subtler connoisseurship of the out-of-season, days without warmth and nights without encounters, empty pleasure-grounds and the violence of the tides.

My months in the Scrubs were a kind of desert in time: beyond their strict and ascetic routines they were featureless, and it is hard in retrospect to know what one did on any day or even in any month. I had had, of course, some experience of deserts, even a taste for them, and knew how to fall back, like a camel on its fat, on an inner reserve of fantasy and contemplation.

The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.

Somehow, we need to create a new habit of mind, as individuals and as a society. We need a mental attitude that values and protects stillness, privacy, solitude, slowness, personal reflection; that honors the inner life; that allows each of us to wander about without schedule within our own minds.

At the beginning of each session, one of us will begin talking about some random idea, another person will chime in or change the subject, and miraculously, after twenty minutes, we find that we have zeroed in on a question that everyone is passionate about. What continues to astonish me is the frequency with which religion slips into the room, unbidden but persistent.

Aku ingin mendekati waktu karena aku ingin mendekati Tuhan.

Don't we owe that young woman, and all of our children, a world in which their contemplative lives are valued and supported? Don't we owe it to ourselves?

It is the celebration of privacy and solitude. It is the willingness to follow one's own thoughts. It is the indulgence of play and unscheduled time.

Where are they now, as he sits at his bedside table, listening to the sound of his running bath, vaguely perceiving the change in the light.

We are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.

The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.

Then he gave himself over to deep and earnest prayer, and after each petition he raised his eyes and looked to the east. And the east lightened and lightened, till he knew that the time was not far off. And when he expected it, he rose to his feet and took off his hat and laid it down on the earth, and clasped his hands before him. And while he stood there the sun rose in the east.