Quotes About Contemplation

A man who sees too far, who is contemporary with the whole future, can no longer act or even move. . . .

To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them. . . .

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?," I now put the same question about anyone alive.

The apprenticeship to passivity—I know nothing more contrary to our habits.

at this hour of the morning, I needed no one.

I breathe in my fashion.

The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

Every inspired state proceeds from a cultivated, willed inanition.

Jaki? pisarz nie dlatego na nas oddzia?a?, ?e?my go du?o czytali, lecz dlatego ?e rozmy?lali?my o nim ponad rozs?dn? miar?.

During the long nights in the caves, how many Hamlets must have murmured their endless monologues

One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one's inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.

Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.

Narrano le vecchie istorie che quando Twashtri creò il mondo, rimase molto perplesso nel creare la donna e dovette pensare a lungo, prima di scegliere gli elementi necessari per formarla. (Le due tigri)

I want to see how I can exist by myself. I want to be allowed to live inside my memory.

There is nothing in the universe but this. I smile. I do not talk to people. I just breathe and stare and exist.

Still, as I mused, the naked room, The alien firelight died away; And from the midst of cheerless gloom I passed to bright, unclouded day.

Words are but the shell; meditation is the kernel.

What of me after parting? I know not-- I'll go back, perhaps, to my old fishing rock on the beach.

When I got started again, I drove slower and felt smaller. I think it does us all good to get looked at like that now and then by a wild animal.

Then the soul, freed from vice, purged by studies of true philosophy, versed in spiritual life, and practised in matters of the intellect, devoted to the contemplation of her own substance, as if awakened from deepest sleep, opens those eyes which all possess but few use, and sees in herself a ray of that light which is the true image of the angelic beauty communicated to her, and of which she then communicates a faint shadow to the body.

The movements of belief are gradual. They resemble the slow rise or fall of ancient coast-lines, where, by imperceptible degrees, sea turns into land, or land into sea. So, without shock or clamor, man smoothly modifies his point of view, till, gazing over the spaces he has traversed, he greatly marvels at the change.

There are for all men moments when the need for some general point of view becomes insistent; when neither labor, nor care, nor pleasure, nor idleness, nor habit will stop a man from asking how he is to regard the universe of reality, how he is to think of it as a whole, how he is to think of his own relation to it.

One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself.

I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.