Quotes About Contemplation

He recommended the contemplation and mental repetition of the name of Jesus, remarking that it reminded him of how, when he was young, old women and girls would sweeten their foul breath with chewing-gum. How much more would Jesus's name banish the foulness of demons, he concluded triumphantly.

Absolute silence might well be, in some instances, our greatest act of worship. Tozer referred to our experiencing a "breathless silence" when we know God is near. Not all worship is expressed in words or actions. Indeed, the closer one comes to a true encounter with God, the less appropriate some words or actions become.

For we cannot speak of the beginning; where the beginning begins our thinking stops, it comes to an end.

Ascension joy—inwardly we must become very quiet to hear the soft sound of this phrase at all. Joy lives in its quietness and incomprehensibility. This joy is in fact incomprehensible, for the comprehensible never makes for joy.1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If we have learned to be silent before the Word, we will also learn to manage our silence and our speech during the day.

Before the heart unlocks itself for the world, God wants to open it for himself; before the ear takes in the countless voices of the day, it should hear in the early hours the voice of the Creator and Redeemer. God prepared the stillness of the first morning for himself. It should remain his.

To be silent does not mean to be inactive; rather it means to breathe in the will of God, to listen attentively and be ready to obey.4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Meditating on the Word

Where the beginning begins, there our thinking stops; there it comes to an end.121

Constantly check your actions and intentions against each verse of this text, one by one, and any practice you engage in will progress and bear fruit with the greatest of ease. Permeate your mind with these teachings day by day, month by month, and without difficulty you will naturally awaken and develop within you all the qualities of a bodhisattva, just as a bee flying from flower to flower sips nectar from each, and from that nectar produces honey.

Immerse yourself in the meaning of the teachings, day after day, month after month, and the spiritual qualities of a bodhisattva will develop without difficulty, like honey collecting in the hive as the bees go from flower to flower, gathering nectar.

What you contemplate, you touch. What you enter into in imagination, you make yourself one with.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a "picture" forever arranged is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger.

Dusty books are my one real passion. New books are like young girls--fit for nothing. A secondhand book is like a person who has traveled; it is only when a book has been handled by several persons and has become dirty that it's fit for contemplation.

Now be still, now that you know what the world is about, knowing it's about nothing.

To think is to be sick...

I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished.

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won't stick out.

I do write quickly, that's true, but I think about my music for a comparatively long time, and until it's complete in my head I don't begin setting it down.

Sumnja mi preseca zalet, priznajem.

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing.

I was wandering around as usual, in my unpleasantly populated sub-conscious...

do not view mountains from the scale of human thought