Quotes About Contemplation

She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head.

she could do things when her body was busy that she could at no other time, things like assemble her worries into ranks, each rank commanded by a hope.

When she [Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia] went to take the waters at Spa, he [René Descartes] wrote to her that to get any benefit from them she should free her mind from all sorts of sad thoughts and even from serious reflections, because those who look long on the green of the forest, the colors of a flower, the flight of a bird, can beguile themselves into not thinking, or thinking of nothing. 'Which is not wasting time but using it well.

I do not recommend ignorance and I am not saying that there is no truth, but I am arguing that the best way to think about truth is to call it the best interpretation that anybody has come up with yet while conceding that no one knows what is coming next. There are lots of competing truths battling with one another for their place in the sun, and the truth is that we have to learn to cope with the conflict. The skies do not open up and drop The Truth into our laps.

In the morning I'm often anti-semantic.

hear you don't believe I know enough to hold office. I wish you to understand that I am thinking about something or other most of the time.

Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on "general principles.

Since I am coming to that holy room,Where, with thy choir of saints forevermore,I shall be made thy music; as I comeI tune the instrument here at the door,And what I must do then, think here before.

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's.

I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.

What if this present were the world's last night?

But think that weAre but turn'd aside to sleep.

Perchance, he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him...

BUSY old fool, unruly Sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?

I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.

I have a room whereinto no one enters Save I myself alone: There sits a blessed memory on a throne, There my life centres.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

Life is apogee, apex, decline; life is death - and everything else is open to discussion.

Loneliness is a strange gift.

It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.

Yet compared with the serious things of life, fishing is after all rather trivial. The thoughtful angler must frankly confess this.

As a general remark, I would say we must move from the moral to the mystical life.

The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.

Nor has he lived in vain, who from his cradle to his grave has passed his life in seclusion.