Quotes About Contemplation

Busy? The word loses all meaning under the canopy of this sky.

When I wake up in the morning," E. B. White once wrote, "I can't decide whether to enjoy the world or improve the world; that makes it difficult to plan the day.

Stop for one whole day every week, and you will remember what it means to be created in the image of God, who rested on the seventh day not from weariness but from complete freedom. The clear promise is that those who rest like God find themselves free like God, no longer slaves to the thousand compulsions that send others rushing toward their graves.

The last thing any of us needs is more information *about* God.

I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape.

Or I can set a little altar, in the world or in my heart. I can stop what I am doing long enough to see where I am, who I am there with, and how awesome the place is.

Reverence requires a certain pace. It requires a willingness to take detours, even side trips, which are not part of the original plan.

On day three, I decided that a power outage would make a great spiritual practice.

The truth is, Papa," she said, "they are not as quick-brained as you or I and therefore all the important things they ought to have said in the first place come to them later when they are in bed or in their baths.

Real intelligence is like a river; the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.

Libraries are not, or at least should not be, engines of productivity. If anything, they should slow people down and seduce them with the unexpected, the irrelevant, the odd and the unexplainable.

concerning." He paused, tilting

I simply don't shine in company. Mostly I prefer to retreat with a book.

After long years of solitary meditation, Jenny had come to accept that, for her, magic was a depth and a stillness rather than the moving brilliance that it was for the great.

Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with nobody to watch one's struggles.

Letty allowed her to ramble on while she looked around the wood, remembering its autumn carpet of beech leaves and wondering if it could be the kind of place to lie down in and prepare for death when life became too much to be endured.

A room in Holmhurst was the last thing she'd come to - better to lie down in the wood under the beech leaces and the bracken and wait quietly for death.

Jane decided he was certainly beautiful, with brown eyes and a well-shaped nose. It is a refreshing thing for an ordinary-looking woman to look at a beautiful man occasionally and Jane gave herself up to contemplation.

Patanjali's method for achieving insight is far from the mystical ecstasy of a poet like St. John of the Cross or the ritual ecstasy of a shaman in a trance. It is instead a contemplative intensity that unbinds the constraints of everyday experience.

Art does not exist only to entertain -- but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in a constant search for the truth.

Empty minds are abhorred by thought as vacuums are by nature.

One aristocratic leader's club was known for, "an atmosphere of solemn tranquility, in which reading, dozing, and meditation took precedence over conversation.

Balfour did, in fact, hold certain basic convictions, but he could see arguments on both sides of a matter, which is the penalty of the thoughtful man.

And oft the starry scope of heaven beneath, When day's tumultuous sounds had ceased to breathe, With fixed feet, as rooted there, Through the long night they drew the chilly air; While sliding o'er their head, In solemn silence dread, The' ethereal orbs their shining course pursued, In holy trance enwrapt the sages stood, With folded arms laid on their reverent breast, And to that Heaven they knew, their orisons addressed.