Quotes About Contemplation

Multiplying my age by 2 in my head/I'm a grandfather. Or Dead.

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady on the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

So, art is saying Stop. It helps us to stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything.

Writing does a lot of other things, of course. People write books to instruct. They write books to move us, to scare us, to enlighten us in all sorts of ways. But basically what these works of literature or of art are doing is to say, Stop thinking. Stop expecting. Stop living in the past. Stop living in the future. Stop doing anything and just pay attention to this.

Is it true, what Jesus believed, this Truth that he died for and lived for? Maybe the only way to know finally this side of falling off that precipice ourselves is to stop speaking and thinking and reading about it so much and to start watching and listening.

Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it.

I let myself flop - so gently, so slowly - into my one real chair and tried to make myself understand that I was on the doorstep of the universe.

Doing nothing is more expedient than doing something.

And when you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.

To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.

I notice that Autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.

Man is the cruelest animal, says Zarathustra. When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell...lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.

Worldly Wisdom Do not stay in the field! Nor climb out of sight. The best view of the world Is from a medium height.

Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.

To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.

Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.

I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.

It is the evening that questions thus from within me.

i have never pondered over questions that are not questions.

The melancholy of everything completed!

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Loneliness is one thing, solitude another: you have learned that - now!

In the end one experiences only oneself.