Quotes About Contemplation

Contempla il corso degli astri52 immaginando di ruotare con loro e pensa come gli elementi si trasformano continuamente gli uni negli altri. Il pensiero di queste cose, infatti, purifica dalle brutture della vita terrena.

Faithfulness leads us to pay attention to our relationship to God—through such attention, we become even more deeply centered in God. Trust is the fruit of that deeper centering. It grows as we center more and more in God.

If you have a library in your garden, everything will be complete.

For the whole life of a philosopher is, as the same philosopher says, a meditation on death.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Loquor enim de docto homine et erudito, cui vivere est cogitare

As I gazed rather intently at the earth my grandfather said: How long will your thoughts continue to dwell upon the earth?

A wise man's life is all one preparation for death.

The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. The difference between lie and lay . Lay is always passive.

I stand on the corner, pretending I am a tree.

Just because there's a silence it doesn't mean that nothing is going on.

This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.

I've been prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence.

What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?

There's time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for - the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound.

I sort of like watching them, he said; I watch laundromat washers the way other people watch television, it's soothing because you always know what to expect and you don't have to think about it. Except I can vary my programmes a little; if I get tired of watching the same stuff I can always put in a pair of green socks or something colourful like that.

I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.

One detaches oneself. One describes.

I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can also mean a mode of execution. It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the others. These are the kinds of litanies I use, to compose myself.

Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow.

Nothing takes place in the bed but sleep; or no sleep. I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There's a lot that doesn't bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last.

Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.

The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still.

hard to get the full view, of the sky, of anything. But we can do it, a little at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world in gasps.