Quotes About Contemplation

Relius lay alone with his thoughts. What kind of man, he wondered, referred to himself as "safely dead"?

To pass time, I concentrated on pleasant memories, laying them out in order and examining them carefully.

If there's anything I've learned in twenty-five years, it's that the more honest you are about what you think, the more you sit in solitude with your own thoughts.

One must learn an inner solitude, wherever one may be.

I need to be silent for a while, worlds are forming in my heart.

Something changed then. I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recognize that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching. I saw myself the way I'd seen the cleaning women in the building across the street. I was just one person in one window. Nobody was watching, except me.

Joanna looked down at

The spiritual space we're trying to find and maintain in meditation practice is the sacred place in each of us.

I always thought faith was kind of a personal thing, Dad says thoughtfully. Everyone has to figure out for themselves how much they should do things like pray or read the Bible.

Assume the attitude of prayer, and in time, the attitude will become prayer.

One never bothers to think about growing old as one is growing older. Then suddenly it is there, looming in your face.

I can't help it; present me with a situation, and I have to think about both sides of it. I can try to suppress it, but I cannot shut off the way I think. Once knowledge is gained, there's no going back to ignorance. I think about what the other feels. I can't stop it

From daybreak to sunset she turned her thoughts, like boulders, over. She set them in long lines. She rearranged their order...

I want a big breakfast, said Fuchsia at last. I want a lot to eat, I'm going to think today.

Thinking is a search for siblings. Yet if thinking is a search for siblings, it also depends on finding the right distance – Abstand – from these siblings.

No, not A reason. Reason itself. I want to work something out in my own mind. I want to arrive at a conclusion because I've thought it through, not because I've been told to believe it.

Arsenius always used to say this, 'Why, words, did I let you get out? I have often been sorry that I have spoken, never that I have been silent.

I feel grateful to the Milesian wench who, seeing the philosopher Thales continually spending his time in contemplation of the heavenly vault and always keeping his eyes raised upward, put something in his way to make him stumble, to warn him that it would be time to amuse his thoughts with things in the clouds when he had seen to those at his feet. Indeed she gave him or her good counsel, to look rather to himself than to the sky. —Michel de Montaigne

You have the luxury of being able to think for yourself.

One piece had been titled "Expectant Silence" and consisted of a man sitting at the piano, playing nothing.

Arrows of insight have to be winged by the feathers of speculation.

of every night you must be open to the Gods, and if

L'important n'est pas de convaincre, mais de donner à réfléchir.

I knew none of it then - if indeed I know any of it now and am not just making patterns in the air.