Quotes About Contemplation

If, as I contend throughout this book, all that is good in religion can be had elsewhere—if, for instance, ethical and spiritual experience can be cultivated and talked about without our claiming to know things we manifestly do not know—then all the rest of our religious activity represents, at best, a massive waste of time and energy.

Once one recognizes the selflessness of consciousness, the practice of meditation becomes just a means of getting more familiar with it.

We spend our lives lost in thought. The question is, what should we make of this fact? In the West, the answer has been "Not much." In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering.

viable path to God

Saint Augustine

It's not so much what we pay attention to, it's the quality of our attention.

I am left with a feeling and I cannot tell if it's emptiness or fullness.

Everyone is looking up toward us, but I am looking back.

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime

The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.

All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.

If one was to think constantly of death, the business of life would stand still.

The custom of frequent reflection will keep their minds from running adrift, and call their thoughts home from useless unattentive roving.Lockeon Education,¶ 176.

ANACHORETE  (ANA'CHORETE)  ANACHORITE  (ANA'CHORITE)  n.s.[sometimes viciously writen  anchorite;Greek] A monk, who, with the leave of his superiour, leaves the convent for a more austere and solitary life. Yet lies not love dead here, but here doth sit,Vow'd to this trench, like an  anachorite. Donne.

When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time, with disorders of the mind very near to madness.

Even now that I have concluded this moving recapitulation, it seems as nothing; and the whole world, my dear is as a bit of dirt under my feet.

They reflected a broader

I should much wish, like the Indian Vishna, to float along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a million years for a few minutes – just to know that I was going to sleep a million years more.

The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human mind is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are absolutely incapable of prayer.

But I do not doubt that it is beneficial sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as in a picture, the image of a grander and better world; for if the mind grows used to the trivia of daily life, it may dwindle too much and decline altogether into worthless thoughts.

Every other science presupposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity.

Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs And vexes meditation with its strange And extreme silentness.