Quotes About Contemplation

Pausing to reflect on your movement does not mean that you are not reflecting through the movement. There should be constant analysis throughout the action, not just afterward. This leads to true understanding.

When you cannot hold the body still, you cannot hold the brain still. If you do not know the silence of the body, you cannot understand the silence of the mind. Action and silence have to go together.

Certainly, the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, and passage to another world, is holy and religious; but the fear of it, as a tribute due unto nature, is weak.

For when a man placeth his thoughts without himself, he goeth not his own way.

A prolonged meditation on unseen realities is sufficiently difficult, and seems scarcely the occupation for which common human nature was intended.

When we contemplate the heroes of Christianity, and compare our feeble efforts with their astonishing performance and self devotion, we should fall into despair, were there not a few softening features, by which they are brought back to the ranks of humanity.

I don't go in and just get to rapping off the dome. I think about it. I really think about it, especially when I make the story.

I'm the sort of person who would be perfectly happy spending an entire day in a rare books room.

I rarely think about myself that much. I really don't.

Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.

It's like breathing in and out to me. It's like having a conversation with someone who isn't there. Because it has to be addressed to somebody - not a particular person, or very rarely.

I live an isolated life, and I rarely meet others.

Given the choice between accomplishing something and just lying around, I'd rather lie around. No contest.

I'm not very religious, but having reached middle age I rather enjoy the quiet and the contemplation of spending an hour in an old building.

For someone who wants to write a story, they should go on thinking about the story. When it comes up to a level, where it has reached your neck that's when you should go about writing it.

I want to take the time to think through how I feel and why I feel. I don't want to feign expertise on matters I know nothing about for the purpose of offering someone else my immediate reaction for their consumption.

I don't really read a lot. Maybe I should.

The ideal, it seems to me, is to show things happening and allow the reader to decide what they mean.

One hopes that with a book or movie, the reader or the audience will emerge from it thinking. That's the most you can hope for: that you've raised questions that will be there for the audience to think about later.

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

I like reading things where someone's looked at what I do with some honesty, and maybe been challenged by it, and they have something to say that shows they've thought about it, even if they don't necessarily like it.

I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.

Listening to classical music is like reading philosophy books. Not everybody has to do it.