Quotes About Contemplation

is under active consideration.

You haven't offended me at all. You've made me think. That's all.

He tilted his hat back slightly, so that he could see the sky more clearly. It was so empty, so dizzying in its height, so unconcerned by the man who was crossing a field beneath it, and thinking as he did so.

He would sit down and consider the situation carefully. Not only did this help to identify the solution to the problem, but it also gave him the opportunity to remind himself that things were not really as bad as they seemed; it was all a question of perspective. Sitting down and looking up at the sky for a few minutes--not at any particular part of the sky, but just at the sky in general--at the vast, dizzying, empty sky of Botswana, cut human problems down to size.

It was a good place to sit and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more powerful when contemplated within confining walls. Out in the open, under such a sky as this, misdeeds were reduced to their natural proportions—small, mean things that could be faced quite openly, sorted, and folded away.

Pickled onions had nothing to do with moral imagination, but were important in their own quiet, vinegary way, Isabel supposed.

That, of course, is always a good time to think—when you know that you are going to have to do something, but you know that you do not have to do it just yet.

When you go home from work at the end of the day, you sit on your small veranda, watching the day turns to dusk, nursing a cup of redbush tea in your hands, and wonder what on earth you can possibly do to help. "The Saturday big tent wedding party " page 41

it made me think of everything I had done. It made me weigh up my life. And it made me want to tie things up, so that next time - and I hope there will not be a next time - the next time I faced death like that, I could think: I have set me life in order.

Mma Ramotswe smiled, but only to herself.

But when all was said and done he thought that there was something beyond us, something other than the human, and that if you closed your eyes and thought about this thing long enough you could hear its voice within you.

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni thought that she was right. He was not a man with a very sophisticated theology, and there were times when he had his serious doubts. But when all was said and done he thought that there was something beyond us, something other than the human, and that if you closed your eyes and thought about this thing long enough you could hear its voice within you. That was enough for him.

looked at Jock Dundas, who was

she sipped at her 1st cup of red bush tea, not in any hurry to do whatever it was that she had to do next. That, of course, is always a good time to think - when you know that you are going to have to do something, but you know that you do not have to do it just yet.

Mma Ramotswe would often stop and look at the sky; and this just went to show how wise she was, because looking at the sky was something that we all should do more often.

Moral philosophy] also has to bear in mind who we are, our human limitations. It's not just something that one does in armchairs. As she spoke, she thought of her own armchair. The last time she had sat in it, she had drifted off to sleep while watching the news. For a moral philosopher's armchair, she thought, it's somewhat under-used.

He who has lived and thought can't help despising people in his soul; him who has felt disturbs the ghost of irrecoverable days; for him there are no more enchantments; him does the snake of memories, him does repentance bite.

El alma del que ha vivido y ha pensado no puede por menos que despreciar a la gente. A aquel que es sensible le atormenta la visión de los días irrevocables; ya no conoce el placer; la víbora del recuerdo y el arrepentimiento le consume.

Why, in truth, sir, was Monte Cristo's reply, man is but an ugly caterpillar for him who studies him through a solar microscope; but you said, I think, that I had nothing else to do. Now, really, let me ask, sir, have you? — do you believe you have anything to do? or to speak in plain terms, do you really think that what you do deserves being called anything?

There is a sort of consolation at the contemplation of the yawning abyss, at the bottom of which lie darkness and obscurity. Edmond

No church or synagogue pew can produce a higher awareness of God than sitting at the base of a tree and observing His creation.

In the poetry of attention, poems are not problems.

I walk reciting every quiet word I know...

it is often more difficult to remember to be mindful than to be mindful itself. (p. 47)