Quotes About Contemplation

poetry requires a different kind of view, one where you look inside.

In her newfound solitude, she felt alternately listless and liberated.

I went on the hill and walked about until twilight had deepened into an autumn night with a benediction of starry quietude over it. I was alone but not lonely. I was a queen and has a fancy.

I'd be in such a hurry to get into bed, nice and quiet, and imagine things

When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

Don't think, but look! (PI 66)

This is how philosophers should salute each other: 'Take your time.

If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in doing so, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

I believe it might interest a philosopher, one who can think himself, to read my notes. For even if I have hit the mark only rarely, he would recognize what targets I had been ceaselessly aiming at.

6.45 : To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical.

Man kann vernünftigerweise nicht einmal auf Hitler eine Wut haben, wieviel weniger auf Gott.

If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.

To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

Don't treat your common sense like an umbrella. When you come into a room to philosophize, don't leave it outside but bring it in with you.

You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one

For man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers;

Parlo, parlo, dico sciocchezze, faccio lo svagato; ma non è vero, sai? Perché osservo tutto io, invece; osservo tutto!

A quanti uomini, presi nel gorgo d'una passione, oppure oppressi, schiacciati dalla tristezza, dalla miseria, farebbe bene pensare che c'è, sopra il soffitto, il cielo, e che nel cielo ci sono le stelle. [...] Contemplandole, s'inabissa la nostra inferma piccolezza, sparisce nella vacuità degli spazii, e non può non sembrarci misera e vana ogni ragione di tormento. Ma bisognerebbe avere in sé, nel momento della passione, la possibilità di pensare alle stelle.

She gazed right through it to the future, another time and place without this jangling cascade of arbitrary noise.

She crouched down, then

I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course.