Quotes About Contemplation

I always sit through the credits. I am always the last one out of any theater. I even make a point of being last. I stay in my seat until everyone else has shuffled past. Then I turn my back, too, on the comforting dark.

wisely reconsidered and let the hand

Trees, how many of 'em do we need to look at?

pero de pronto me abrumó la idea de salir a la calle, de pisar de nuevo la ciudad a esa hora sucia del atardecer, hora perdida de pasos perdidos, hora inútil.

Churches are so nice when they're empty. Like empty streets. You can see their shape.

Alone. She realized how much she had missed the luxury of solitude, and knew that its occasional comfort would always be essential to her. The pleasure of being on one's own was not so much spiritual as sensuous, like wearing silk, or swimming without a bathing suit on, or walking along a totally empty beach with the sun on your back. One was restored by solitude. Refreshed.

already upstairs in her

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

When I stay in one Place, I can hardly think at all; my body had to be on the move to set my mind going. Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Silence is letting what there is be what it is. In that sense it has to do profoundly with God: the silence of simply being. We experience that at times when there is nothing we can say or do that would not intrude on the integrity and the beauty of that being.

These are two poles in the soul's life: loss of self in what one is contemplating and self-willed assertion of what lies within the self. These are two great opposites. If you wish to attain real knowledge and permeate yourself with wisdom, self-will is lethal. In ordinary life, we know self-will only as prejudice—and prejudices always destroy higher insight.

The student is told to set apart moments in his daily life in which to withdraw into himself, quietly and alone. He is not to occupy himself at such moments with the affairs of his own ego. This would result in the contrary of what is intended. He should rather let his experiences and the messages from the outer world re-echo within his own completely silent self. At such silent moments every flower, every animal, every action will unveil to him secrets undreamt of.

Es totalmente arbitrario considerar como una totalidad, como un todo, la suma de lo que experimentamos de una cosa por medio de la mera percepción, y considerar como algo añadido, sin relación alguna con esa misma cosa, aquello que resulta de la contemplación pensante.

It is easy to decide what men ought to be; but the student works in the depths, not on the surface.

My heart is heavy with the things I do not understand.

If your mirror be broken, look into still water; but have a care that you do not fall in.     ââ'¬â€Hindu Proverb.

Ahae! My heart is heavy with the things that I do not understand.

known as the five 'hindrances' (n?vara?a): sensual desire, ill-will, tiredness and sleepiness, excitement and depression, and doubt. An ancient simile compares the mind that is continually prey to the five hindrances to a bowl of water disturbed or contaminated in five ways: mixed with red dye, steaming hot, full of moss and leaves, ruffled by the wind, muddied and in a dark place.

I too am subject to ageing, sickness, and death, not beyond ageing, sickness, and death, and that I should see another who is old, sick or dead and be shocked, disturbed, and disgusted —this is not fitting.' As I reflected thus, the conceit of youth, health, and life entirely left me.21

The unexamined life is not worth living'...Socrates made provocative remarks like this famous one as part of his daily practice in Athens in the late fourth century B.C. When he made these statements, he was invariably exhorting his fellow Greeks to avoid falling into the trap of what we might call 'ethical complacency,' the point at which an individual ceases trying to become a better person.

All of this comes out of what is now an empty space. There are depths to this. It's a lot to think about. From an empty space the future. If there's no empty space where can one put the future? It all figures if you take the time to think it out.

It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.

Old Jiko is supercareful with her time. She does everything really really slowly, even when she's just sitting on the veranda, looking out at the dragonflies spinning lazily around the garden pond. She says that she does everything really really slowly in order to spread time out so that she'll have more of it and live longer, and then she laughs so that you know she is telling you a joke.

Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.