Quotes About Contemplation

Repose, leisure, peace, belong among the elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, from unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy. And what of contemplation? Its very premise is freedom from the fetters of workaday busyness. Moreover, it itself actualizes this freedom by virtue of being intuition.

Earthly contemplation means to the Christian, we have said, this above all: that behind all that we directly encounter the Face of the incarnate Logos becomes visible... Contemplation does not ignore the "historical Gethsemane," does not ignore the mystery of evil, guilt and its bloody atonement. The happiness of contemplation is a true happiness, indeed the supreme happiness; but it is founded upon sorrow.

The delight we take in our senses is an implicit desire to know the ultimate reason for things, the highest cause. The desire for wisdom that philosophy etymologically is is a desire for the highest or divine causes. Philosophy culminates in theology. All other knowledge contains the seeds of contemplation of the divine.

Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as a whole.

Sabes lo que es quedarse a la orilla de uno mismo, contemplándose?

Cómo va a entender que esas cosas, que se pueden hacer pensando en otras, no agotan como las que no pueden hacerse ni pensando constantemente, profunda, desgarradoramente en ellas mismas?

Thus I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species.

When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.

I shall therefore retire into the Town, if I may make use of that Phrase, and get into the Crowd again as fast as I can, in order to be alone. I can there raise what Speculations I please upon others without being observed my self, and at the same time enjoy all the Advantages of Company with all the Privileges of Solitude.

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning... a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.

Have you ever felt time slow so much that that it almost appears to stop? Ever listened to a clock when the next tick seems to take forever to follow the last tock?

zacatecas purple. That

At night I sit in my room and read the Bible. In the distance, the sea roars. Then I lay awake for a long time and think of the quiet, pale man from Nazareth.

whatever we frequently think of and ponder, that will become the inclination of our minds.

All things arise when the appropriate conditions are present, and all things pass away as conditions change. Behind the process, there is no "self" who is running the show.

God was not in the details for Jefferson; he was in the sky and stars.

It is better to stir up a question without deciding it, than to decide it without stirring it up.

Misery is almost always the result of thinking.

The breath of the mind is attention 128

Close your eyes and see.

Cercando la parola si trovano i pensieri.

I should like to slip out of the public gaze...to bury myself in the farm and devote my attention to farming and educating." Mahatma Gandhi

When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there. (Mr Hunter's Grave, 1956)