Quotes About Contemplation

the wild velocity of motherhood, an enforced momentum forbidding contemplation.

The quality that all last words share: the silence after.

I hadn't remembered that in decades. That particular quiet.

The night is my companion, and solitude my guide

Olga sits on the carpet in front of her shelves with stacks of books scattered around her, struggling to pick between her old favorites. She's all bent over, like a puppet without a hand inside it.

She felt a moment of anxiety as she contemplated all the things that could go wrong, but her anger was too great for her to back down. And anyway, she knew exactly what would happen. As soon as she was out of the door, he'd call his mother.

Quiet doesn't mean you don't have important things to say. Just that you might take your time saying them.

I often wondered a great deal about the inner life and thought of these self-contained old fishermen; their minds seemed to be fixed upon nature and the elements rather than upon any contrivances of man, like politics or theology.

the theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake.

Can the theater teach us to wait? To forestall our satisfaction? Poems teach us how to wait. The natural world makes us wait. Erik Satie teaches us how to wait. And so does much music. Will YouTube teach us how to wait? Will YouTube teach us how to die?  

For the past two years, I had coasted along these waters and each year ended the same. With me returning alone.

If I were to die today, she thought, and someone were to think over my life, they'd never know that moments like this, here on the Horseferry Road, between a Baptist chapel and a tobacconist's, were the truest things in it.

Irish poet David Whyte, pausing after a complex thought, or a hoary quandary, looking out to the room of devotees who flock to his workshops around the world, and asking, "But what is the more beautiful question?" And we are immediately reminded that there is always a more beautiful question that should be asked. I've heard David explain that asking the more beautiful question (invariably the courageous one) delivers us the answer we seek.

Insomnia isn't really to do with not being able to sleep; it's about not having given ourselves a chance to think.

book out fifteen minutes either side of every one of her appointments. "I use it to reflect on what just happened," she says. "It gives me the space to view what I need to do next.

YOU MUST LEAVE ROOM in your worldview for mystery—accepting the limitations of your understanding and knowledge. I will never be predictable or controllable, but I am trustworthy. When adversity strikes you or your loved ones, remember the words of Job: The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD.

can do My best handiwork when you sit in the stillness of My Presence, focusing your entire being on Me.

Whenever and wherever you put yourself in touch with GOD, that is the state of meditation.

Silence is the speech of the spiritual seeker.

Some rather seek up high Than dig and grind that inner truth

Doing nothing is respectable at tea.

Heather cocks her head to one side as if she's trying to make the information roll down a hill in her mind and come to rest in a place she can access it.

The clue's always, always, buried deep in the boredom... Where do you feel most bored? Go there.

I'm never less at leisure than when at leisure, or less alone than when alone.