Quotes About Contemplation

Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.

Don't tear anything up: it creates blanks, silences—like the dashes of [Paul] Valéry.

I smoke, get up, move about. I cannot bear my own company. I have not learned yet to replace introspection by thinking. I could meditate on Spengler, for instance, but in ten minutes I am again devouring myself.

I feel that if I sit down now I will do some bad thinking about Lawrence. Remember Gide on Dostoevsky—"When he began to explain himself he showed himself a bad thinker.

Free thought is a passion; it is much rather the thoughts than ourselves that are free.

Freedom of thought is the only good that is perhaps more precious than peace, for the simple reason that, without it, peace would merely be another name of servitude.

Will it be here that we shall find a place which will not elude us, or which if it remains does not exert on us a culpable attraction? Or must we, leaning over the deck and watching the shores glide by, move forever onward?

I had forgotten I was alone; I sat there, waiting for nothing, oblivious to the time.

Mes sens s'étaient usés jusqu'à la transparence, et quand je descendis au matin vers la ville, l'azur du ciel entra en moi.

He let Julius go. There was beginning to rise in him a feeling of profound disgust--a kind of hatred almost, of himself, of Julius, of everything.

There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection

What a melancholy day! I said. Aren't you bored? Not particularly. I am reading.

Leo demasiado; todo eso fermenta.

The house was quiet, my room dark and still. I lay awake and thought of all the good men on TV who'd been shot in the head. I saw again the dead soldiers lying on the ground , and until Pop had cried over us, I hadn't thought much about Jeb and me having to go and fight, too. But in only nine years I'd be as old as the dead, and it'd be my turn, wouldn't it?

I am neither sad nor cheerful; the air here fills one with a kind of vague excitement and induces a state as far removed from cheerfulness as it is from sorrow; perhaps it is happiness.

Andrea Camilleri

I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you're by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone – as it seems to me – is in danger.

East coasters ... attenders at the church of What Is

Tip 2 Think! About Your Work

every one must have some solitary spot where he can be alone with his God.

mind for a time on some one of the lessons of faith

meditations as here offered, and when we think we have

It is only by continuously fixing the mind for a time on some one of the lessons of faith, that the believer is gradually helped to take and thoroughly assimilate them.

Though in its beginnings prayer is so simple that the feeble child can pray, yet it is at the same time the highest and holiest work to which man can rise. It