Quotes About Contemplation

I can never give a 'yes' or a 'no.' I don't believe everything in life can be settled by a monosyllable.

All our troubles come from not being able to be alone.

We only really, deeply consider what our life is when we're faced with mortality on some level.

I don't go through life verbalizing what I feel.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and wonder if my life would be different if I had to do it over... Then a voice comes to me out of the dark that says, "boy, there's an original thought!

in writing we live life twice: once in the experience, and again in recording and reflecting upon our experience.

As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, "those who devote themselves to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose constitute an interesting subject for study.

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness

My favorite journey is looking out the window.

I now turn fully to face you, 0 God, the source of the universe and of my life, as I enter into silence.

A wise old owl sat upon an oak The more he saw the less he spoke The less he spoke the more he heard Why aren't we like that wise old bird

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.

Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep

Without knowing it or meaning to, we are training ourselves to be constantly on the alert for interruptions; to seek out messages incessantly, to process data rather than discover, invent, think, or feel, and in general to lose the propensity or even the capacity to ponder, pause, imagine, or give full focus to anyone or anything for more than a few restive moments.

They travel long distances to stroll along the seashore, for reasons they can't put into words.

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it.

Most people avoid thinking if they can, some of us are addicted to thinking, but Von Neumann actually enjoyed thinking, maybe even to the exclusion of everything else.

and I rose up, and knew that I was tired, and continued my journey

Yet I think he was not wholly the loser by being unable to think. The eye untroubled by thought sees things like a mirror newly burnished; at night, for example, the musing can see nothing before him but a mist, but if he stops thinking quickly the roads, the walls, the trees become visible. (pp217)

By night an atheist half believes a God.

By all means use some time to be alone.

By night an atheist half believes in God.