Quotes About Contemplation

The key to wisdom is doubt!

The word that comes to mind is "equanimity." After meditating, I was better able to watch what happened around me without jumping into reactions.

There is a level accessed in meditation that is beyond the neuron. This level has many names; one we could use is infinite awareness.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived, —THOMAS MERTON

Most of the things we need to be most fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest.

One of the most convicting things I have recently come to realize about Jesus is that He was never, not once, in a hurry.

Silence is the room we create for the searching of God, where we hear His voice and follow.

under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts, must have wondered at my impulse to touch her, which was like touching myself, the way your own hand feels when you hold it because you want to feel contained.

In my own Examen, then, I praydream—prayerfully daydream. I concretely imagine how I might approach the next twenty-four hours if I were to be God's hands and feet and voice.

After five minutes, or ten, or fifteen—it doesn't matter—open your eyes and resume your day. For a moment or two things might seem more alive.

Simply speaking, they showed him that he could be kind. In his years of spiritual searching he had perfected all kinds of esoteric talents. He could take his mind into spheres of nothingness, go for days and weeks without eating, and rend his flesh with the best of them, but he was still operating with barely disguised contempt, not benevolence, toward himself and his world. When the enlightened Buddha told his admirer that he was awake, it was this basic kindness he was pointing to.

And Siobhan says people go on holidays to see new things and relax, but it wouldn't make me relaxed and you can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of the solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles. And I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly. And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of it being new.

And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.

How often did he feel it now, this gorgeous, furtive seclusion? In the bath sometimes, maybe. Though Jean failed to understand his need for periodic isolation and regularly dragged him back to earth mid-soak by hammering on the locked door in search of bleach or dental floss.

He had always thought of solitary diners as sad. But now that he was the solitary diner, he felt rather superior. On account of the book, mostly. Learning something while everyone else was wasting time. Like working at night.

I numeri primi sono ciò che rimane una volta eliminati tutti gli schemi: penso che i numeri primi siano come la vita. Sono molto logici ma non si riesce mai a scoprirne le regole, anche se si passa tutto il tempo a pensarci su

Sit still long enough and everything will come to you.

And I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly.

penso che i numeri primi siano come la vita. Sono molto logici ma non si riesce mai a scoprirne le regole, anche se si passa tutto il tempo pensarci su.

Perhaps this is what all prayer is, when the ceremony and the theology are peeled away, a serious stillness in which one talks quietly to one's own best self.

And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you... ... ...and that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means that they are so small you don't have to take them into account when you are calculating something.

And I said, "I needed to sit down and be quiet and think." And he said, "OK, let's keep it simple. What are you doing at the railway station?" And I said, "I'm going to see Mother." And he said, "Mother?

When he finally let the car it was because e could no longer bear his own company in such a confined space.

Fu tentato di iniziare un altro dei regali di Natale ancora non letti. Ma bisognava lasciare che l'atmosfera di un libro si diradasse, prima di buttarsi nel prossimo [...]