Quotes About Contemplation

Only in the pauses between things, in the brief contemplative spaces of just being, can we catch a glimpse of love itself.

Outside I saw her sitting in the wheelchair, hands folded on her lap, and I knew I was living the moment that says nothing, that will allow nothing said of consequence.

Benny was not reading any more. He was looking straight ahead.

It is very easy to love alone.

What is the answer? [ I [Alice B Toklas] was silent ] In that case, what is the question?

I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.

I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading it never can do.

Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting.

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

Cycling can be lonely, but in a good way. It gives you a moment to breathe and think, and get away from what you're working on.

And I love working, that's my life. I'm a lonely person anyway. I don't like being around a load of people so I can work on myself and think.

When I'm not working, I like to do things alone, just to take a breath.

There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

I visualize things in my mind before I have to do them. It's like having a mental workshop.

I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.

The living room is where we come to think, to slow down the world for a second.

Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause.

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.

All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

If there be anything that can be called genius, it consists chiefly in ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind, till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides.

As you get older, you mellow, but there's a natural propensity to watch what you say, 'cause you learn that you want more time and space to craft what you want to say because you're less likely to want to say impetuous things, or things that aren't thought-out properly.