Quotes About Contemplation

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. Poem: The Ponds

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done?

Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors to my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.

Song of the Builders On a summer morning I sat down on a hillside to think about God— a worthy pastime. Near me, I saw a single cricket; it was moving the grains of the hillside this way and that way. How great was its energy, how humble its effort. Let us hope it will always be like this, each of us going on in our inexplicable ways building the universe.

What is your heart doing now? Remembering. Remembering!

If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more.

When I think of death it is a bright enough city

Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered.

What we must do, I suppose, is to hope the world keeps its balance; what we are to do, however, with our hearts waiting and watching-truly I do not know.

And maybe there will be, after all, some slack and perfectly balanced blind and rough peace, finally, in the deep and green and utterly motionless pools after all that falling?

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.

I'm older than I used to be, and therefore I understand things nobody would think of who's young and in a hurry.

A poem on the page speaks to the listening mind.

almost every poem in the universe moves too slowly.

Every summer I gather a few stones from the beach and keep them in a glass bowl. Now and again I cover them with water, and they drink. There's no question about this; I put tinfoil over the bowl, tightly, yet the water disappears. This doesn't mean we ever have a conversation, or that they have the kind of feelings we do, yet it might mean something. Whatever the stones are, they don't lie in the water and do nothing.

The way I'd like to go on living in this world wouldn't hurt anything, I'd just go on walking uphill and downhill, looking around, and so what if half the time I don't know what for —

It wasn't about the bird, it was something about the way stone stays mute and put, whatever goes flashing by.

Fifteen minutes of music with nothing playing.

He lives nowhere but on the page, and in the attentive mind that leans above that page.

I have my ways of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. — Mary Oliver, from "How I Go to the Woods," Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Beacon Press, 2010)

When one is alone and lonely, the body gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, or splashes into the cold river, or pushes through the ice-crusted snow.

I'm older than I used to be, and therefore I understand things nobody would think of who's young and a hurry.

The words, in the long lines of Leaves of Grass, as near as words can be, are a spiritual and a physical touching.