Quotes About Contemplation

La mia vita mi spinge a immaginarmi come sarebbe stata la sua se le fosse toccato ciò che è toccato a me, che uso avrebbe fatto della mia fortuna. E

Pero sigo pensando que cuando nos atribuimos de modo más o menos arbitrario la tarea de contar no debemos preocuparnos por la serenidad de quien nos lee, sino solo por construir ficciones que ayuden a contemplar la condición humana sin demasiados filtros.

After all, when you take a walk you're after solitude, and if the solitude won't come to you, you must go to it.

You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.

Think higher, feel deeper.

I had often flipped through a calendar wondering on which of the 366 days (counting February 29) I would die, but it had never once occurred to me to wonder whether I had already met the first person I would have sex with.

but even with Varenka, Koznyshev almost proposed to her when they were picking mushrooms. Koznyshev had therefore at least contemplated having sex with Varenka. There were no women in that book with whom nobody thought about having sex.

If one chews a problem over long enough, it becomes apparent that the jaw is aching, and what started as weighing heavy on the heart ends up a pain in the neck.

Contemplation and writing demand solitude, which leads to a sorry feeling of isolation and detachment. Writers try to call their loneliness genius, and the world believes them most of the time.

The greatness of poetry comes from its struggle to express the rapture of the soul in the contemplation of beauty.

Sometimes it is better to imagine the past than to remember it.

To appreciate art, the observer must adopt a special attitude of mind; the same attitude required by Plato, of detachment from personal concerns, so that the work of art can be appreciated in contemplative fashion uncontaminated by personal needs or preoccupations.

She knew and, I think, understood the joy that my mind derived, at these first hearings, from this task of modelling a still shapeless nebula.40

Art was important to the pessimistic Schopenhauer because the aesthetic mode of knowing, the pure contemplation of beauty, the tranquil appreciation of the Ideas, enabled the individual to escape, for the time being, from the never-ending misery of unsatisfied desire into a Nirvana of spiritual peace.

Reading his account leaves one with the impression that being taken out of oneself, forgetting oneself as an individual, as he puts it, invariably leads to a contemplative state from which all passion is absent. In fact, he describes the aesthetic attitude as an objective frame of mind, as if stepping into another world, 'where everything that moves our will, and thus violently agitates us, no longer exists'.20

No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.' De Quincey

I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind.

A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use.

Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

To lose one's self in reverie, one must be either very happy, or very unhappy. Reverie is the child of extremes.