Quotes About Contemplation

mind her when I'm away?' I stayed overnight in

of the short journey passed in silence.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.

The only way to gain power in a world that is moving too fast is to learn to slow down. And the only way to spread one's influence wide to learn how to go deep. The world we want for ourselves and our children will not emerge from electronic speed but rather from a spiritual stillness that takes root in our souls. Then, and only then, will we create a world that reflects the heart instead of shattering it.

The story is told of Mother Theresa that when an interviewer asked her. What do you say when you pray? she answered, I listen. The reporters paused a moment, then asked, Then what does God say? and she replied, He listens. It is hard to imagine a more succinct way to get at the intimacy of contemplative prayer.

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.

You best keep to yourself, except you never can.

Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time.

when I see a man or woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly.

My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find its lurking places.

For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.

In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I'd try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot, since many of the ones who weren't mine were Boughton's. And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they didn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams.

The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately.

You can say to yourself, I'm just a body that thinks and talks and seems to want its life, one more day of it. You don't have to know why. Well, nothing could ever change if your body didn't just keep you there not even knowing what it is you're waiting for. Not even knowing that you're waiting at all. Just there on the stoop in the moonlight licking up tears.

I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.

He would pick up eggshells, a bird's wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp's nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jackknife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses.

I think through things. It calms me. Otherwise I don't react as well as I could have. As I would have wanted to.

Loneliness is not a problem, it is a passion.

My heart was very heavy. There was Boughton sitting in his Morris chair staring at nothing. Glory told me the only words he had said all day were Jesus never had to be old.

it's hard to find time to think about Kansas.

Fill my head with any thoughts but those that fill it now.' She could not yet cry, for her tears were far too deep to reach.

No hay placer más complejo que el pensamiento y a él nos entregamos»

Take all the time you need.