Quotes About Contemplation

There was nothing on yet except for the tobacco reports, so I snapped the radio back off and tried to figure out where to go.

Years later I would realize that this was one of the worlds great problems, that people often allow themselves not to think. They choose not to think, and that's how the whole world gets into trouble.

Years later I would realize that this was one of the world's great problems, that people often allow themselves not to think. They choose not to think, and that's how the whole world gets into trouble.

True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty

We live with – and within – a gap between knowledge and wisdom. It is time philosophers, and everyone else, started to try and think about that gap. Maybe more than our personal peace of mind is at stake.

I stood up and looked in his direction, at his folded hands. Between then there seemed to rest a sunflower. At last I made up my mind and without a word I left the room.

My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.

I should like this sky, this quiet water, to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me.

Has my watch stopped? No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don't look at them. Think of something else - anything else: think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting.

All around me the world lies like an immense hypothesis that I no longer verify.

Between women love is contemplation; caresses are meant less to appropriate the other than to recreate oneself slowly through her; separation is eliminated, there is neither fight nor victory nor defeat; each one is both subject and object

For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence.

I was still keenly aware as in my childhood of the inexplicable nature of my presence here on earth; where had I come from here; where was I going? I often thought about these things with a kind of stupefied horror and used to fill my diary with long self-communings

Wenigstens eine kleine Weile lang mußte ich, jedem Anspruch entrückt, in Frieden mit mir selbst sprechen können, ohne daß irgendjemand mich dabei unterbrach.

In the afternoons I would sit out on the balcony outside the dining-room; there, level with the tops of the trees that shaded the boulevard Raspail, I would watch the passers-by.

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me.

En general la soledad no me aterra y en pequeñas dosis hasta me distiende: las presencias que me son caras me fatigan el corazón.

Curiosa cosa, un diario: lo que uno calla es más importante que lo que anota.)

Algunos días detestaba el mar; era monótono e infinito como la ausencia.

Distesa su un prato, contemplavo, proprio all'altezza del mio occhio, l'accavallarsi dei fili d'erba, tutti identici, ciascuno affondato nella minuscola giungla che gli nascondeva tutti gli altri. Questa ripetizione indefinita dell'ignoranza, dell'indifferenza, equivaleva alla morte. Levai gli occhi alla quercia; dominava il paesaggio e non aveva eguali. Io sarei stata come lei.

Humility is attentive patience.

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

There are four evidences of divine mercy here below. The favors of God to beings capable of contemplation (these states exist and form part of their experience as creatures). The radiance of these beings, and their compassion, which is the divine compassion in them. The beauty of the world. The fourth evidence is the complete absence of mercy here below.