Quotes About Contemplation

as i sit here looking at the window, i feel broken and empty.

I like anything that is thought provoking and elevates one's consciousness to the highest and out of it's safety net, making one breathe aspiration.

It wasn't the aloneness that Liz minded. It was the silence. It echoed.

Most of the time it may seem like I'm staring into nothingness, but there's a whole world playing out in my head.

Virtue could see to do what Virtue wouldBy her own radiant light, though sun and moonWere in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's selfOft seeks to sweet retired solitude,Where, with her best nurse Contemplation,She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings.

Others apart sat on a hill retir'd,In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd highOf Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,And found no end, in wand'ring mazes lost.

Hail divinest Melancholy.

Come, pensive nun, devout and pure, sober steadfast, and demure, all in a robe of darkest grain, flowing with majestic train.

How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has its glorious starry firmament for a roof. In such places, standing alone on the mountaintop, it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make -- leaves and moss like the marmots and the birds, or tents or piled stone -- we all dwell in a house of one room -- the world with the firmament for its roof -- are all sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track.

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

May the cheering contemplation of the glorious hope set before us—support and animate us to improve our short interval on earth, and fill us with a holy ambition of shining as lights in this evil world, to the praise and glory of His grace—who has called us out of darkness, into His glorious light!

You have traveled too fast over false ground; Now your soul has come to take you back. Take refuge in your senses, open up To all the small miracles you rushed through. Become inclined to watch the way of rain When it falls slow and free. Imitate the habit of twilight, Taking time to open the well of color That fostered the brightness of day. Draw alongside the silence of stone Until its calmness can claim you.

God help us all but he was right. It was time for him to die. There was nothing for him to do today, there was nothing for him to do today.… There, that was settled. Now let the whole thing begin again.

Contemplation places us in a purity and radiance which is far above our understanding.

Seek in reading and thou shalt find in meditation; knock in prayer and it shall be opened in contemplation.

Taking time apart. The first and perhaps most obvious examples are the occasions when Jesus explicitly pursued time apart. These came in the form of stepping back and away from the outward ministry and into a space of reflection, silence, and walking—being alone. We may envision these as the "times in the desert." What they point to, at essence, are spaces to reconnect with the deeper inner voice, that spirit of purpose and vocation, and time to breathe, pray, and reflect.

We can say that true gratitude does not give rise to the debtor's ethic because it gives rise to faith in future grace. With true gratitude there is such a delight in the worth of God's past grace, that we are driven on to experience more and more of it in the future...it is done by transforming gratitude into faith as it turns from contemplating the pleasures of past grace and starts contemplating the promises of the future.

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. C. S. LEWIS

Thinking is one of the important ways that we put the fuel of knowledge on the fires of worship and service to the world.

God's gift of understanding is through thinking, not instead of thinking.

The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves.

I read many books, I saw many, many movies. I watched other lives, only through a window.

If everybody contemplates the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera.