Quotes About Contemplation

If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'll bet they'd live a lot differently.

Sometimes when I'm talking, my words can't keep up with my thoughts. I wonder why we think faster than we speak. Probably so we can think twice.

Sometimes when I'm talking, my words can't keep up with my thoughts. I wonder why we think faster than we speak. Probably so we can think twice.

If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'll bet they'd live a lot differently.

You ever think about this? Every year you live, you pass the anniversary of your death. Now you don't know what day it is, of course.

Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are talking to an unseen creator.

I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.

Four-fifths of all our troubles would disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still.

Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

If I'm sending emails, and I get all wound up and stressed and don't know what to do with myself for 20 minutes, I just go soak in hot water and lie there, thinking, 'What should I do?' So it's meditative.

I'm blessed, and... all the time, I sit and think, 'Wow.'

On the trail from Namche Bazaar, you come up and you see this big mountain, Ama Dablam. Wow! I just started thinking, what would it feel like to be on the top of that mountain? What would you be able to see?

Sometimes you watch yourself, and you think, 'Oh, wow.'

After I've sat back and looked at my body of work, thought about it, I go, 'Wow, I guess I am a Hall of Famer.'

Books have this function that help me to understand the work I've done, to wrap it up.

I've been approached for views about doing a book, but I never wrapped my head around it in terms of, where does it end? I suppose, after being inducted into the Hall of Fame, that gave me a second thought.

I used to spend hours just sitting in an old wreck of a car with a stickshift; I'd just sit there and shift.

Not a whole lot of us are wrestling somebody for a canned food item in the supermarket or having an ax fight in the jungle clearing. Instead, we sit and think about taxes and the ozone layer.

Solitude is very different from a 'time-out' from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows. Whenever we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from the places where we interact with each other directly, we are potentially opened for a deeper intimacy with each other.

The biggest achievement is to create silence. I think every real writer who has a passion to do justice to the world thinks this way.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

My temper is of a recluse and contemplative cast; had it been otherwise, I should, perhaps, on some former occasions, have entered into the active concerns of the world and not have been connected with it merely as a writer of books.