Quotes About Contemplation

Sometimes when it looks like I'm deep in thought I'm just trying not to have a conversation with people. PETE WENTZ

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly... very slowly.

The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind. It is no accident that the contemplative Egyptians, together with such later poetic spirits as Poe, Gautier, Baudelaire, and Swinburne, were all sincere worshippers of the supple grimalkin.

I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel.

I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone.

for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realize.

I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise.

mejor era vislumbrar un instante el cielo y perecer, que vivir sin haber contemplado jamás el día.

It's a pity we don't whistle at one another, like birds. Words are misleading. I am always trying to forget words. That is why I contemplate the lilies of the field, but in particular the glacier. If one looks at the glacier for long enough, words cease to have any meaning on God's earth.

Quite so. On the other hand, I am like that horse that was dumbfounded for twenty-four hours. For a long time I thought I could never endure having survived. Then I went back to the pasture.

But to be able to bear one's own mind, to wait while the inner storm of intolerable thoughts blows itself out, leaving one to contemplate the debris with some understanding--that is an enviable state of mind.

Justice] demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.

Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.

What are we "doing" when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?

To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.

La pensée se dédouble entre pensée abstraite et jugement dès qu'elle fait intervenir le dialogue avec soi.

For the need to think can never be stilled by allegedly definite insights of "wise men"; it can be satisfied only through thinking, and the thoughts I had yesterday will satisfy this need today only to the extent that I want and am able to think them anew.

Quaestio Mihi Factus Sum" ("I am become a question to myself")

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Nothing expressed in words can ever attain to the immobility of an object of contemplation. Compared to the latter, meaning, which can be said and spoken about, is slippery; if the philosopher wants to see and grasp it, it slips away.

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.

La dicotomía entre contemplar la verdad en soledad y apartamiento y quedar atrapado en las relaciones y relatividades de los asuntos humanos se convirtió en algo indiscutible para la tradición del pensamiento político.

It is like the distinction between war and peace: just as war takes place for the sake of peace, thus every kind of activity, even the processes of mere thought, must culminate in the absolute quiet of contemplation.11 Every movement, the movements of body and soul as well as of speech and reasoning, must cease before truth. Truth, be it the ancient truth of Being or the Christian truth of the living God, can reveal itself only in complete human stillness.12 Traditionally

Certain problems cannot be solved if you are constantly entertained and distracted.