Quotes About Contemplation

At least once a day, allow yourself the freedom to think and dream for yourself.

I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.

When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.

Oh juventud nunca dejes de pensar...

The essential in the being of a man of my type lies precisely in what he thinks and how he thinks, not in what he does or suffers.

I want to know God's thoughts. The rest are details.

Darkness promotes speech.

And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had 'walked over our grave,' as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us - the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.

The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that, when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.

Je me rendis compte que personne - pas même mon père, assis à quelques pas de moi - ne pouvait pénétrer mon espace de lecture, distinguer ce que le livre m'expliquait avec impudeur, et que rien, sinon ma propre volonté, ne pouvait en donner à quiconque la possibilité.

It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Can you say something about nothing?

one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.' 'A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,' said the Savage promptly. 'Quite so…

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east...

My mind is so busy thinking about values that I don't have time to experience them.

Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor.

What fun would it be if one didn't have to think about happiness

The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.

Consider the horse' They considered it.

All my thoughts are second thoughts.

Shut lips, sleeping faces, Every stopped machine, The dumb and littered places Where crowds have been:. All silences rejoice, Weep (loudly or low), Speak-but with the voice Of whom, I do not know.