Quotes About Contemplation

The dissolving power of conversation. One realizes why both meditation and action require silence.

The mind that puts everything in question reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

In order not to have to resolve them, I have turned all my practical difficulties into theoretical ones. Faced with the Insoluble, I breathe at last. . . .

In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all. In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course of a day, best to experience its benefit straight off, when you get up. Or else use it only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision.

When we see someone again after many years, we should sit down facing each other and say nothing for hours, so that by means of silence our consternation can relish itself.

If only we could return to those ages when no utterance shackled existence, to the laconism of interjections, to the joyous stupor of the pre- verbal!

A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have nothing... It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us dissimilar.

In Marx's entire oeuvre, I don't think there is a single disinterested reflection on death... I was pondering this at his grave in Highgate.

It may very well be tht man's sole purpose is none other than to think of god. If we could either love him or ignore him we would be saved.

As the years accumulate, we form an increasingly somber image of the future.

If, as we grow older, we scrutinize our own past at the expense of 'problems', it is simply because we handle memories more readily than ideas.

Meditate but one hour upon the self's nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man," said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect

We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it.

The book which, after demolishing everything, fails to demolish itself will have exasperated us to no purpose.

Every form of haste, even toward the good, betrays some mental disorder.

A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have done nothing. . . . It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us dissimilar.

Not to haw been born, merely musing on that-what happiness, what freedom, what space!

All twilights are on my side.

What is known as "wisdom" is ultimately only a perpetual "thinking it over," i.e., non-action as first impulse.

Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned.

my greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end.

Silence," he would say, "brings man closer to God and makes him, on earth, like unto the angels.

At twenty, those nights when for hours at a time I would stand, forehead pressed against the pane, staring into the dark. . . .

Incapable of getting up, nailed to my bed, I drift with the whims of my memory