Quotes About Contemplation

I gathered his words like an old woman who picks up spilled beads, and his slowness gave me opportunity to consider the light and color and life in each.

Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it's the shutting of the door that makes the difference. Solitude is a time for stripping away everything in order to focus on God. (Matt 6:6)

There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.

How one minute she was talking to you and the next she had slipped into a private world where she turned her thoughts over and over, digesting stuff most people would choke on. I wanted to say, Teach me how to do that. Teach me how to take all this in.

At crucial times we must seek out periods of inner solitude, deep brooding and being, intervals of spiritual apartness where we move down into the depths of ourselves to mine the dark gorge and bring new treasure into the light.

The night seemed like an inkblot I had to figure out.

you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

I sat at her desk and turned one page after another, staring at what looked like bits and pieces of black lace laid cross the paper.

Have you noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get? While

Quietness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums. I didn't know if it was the emptiness, the

Sunk in the mud, it took all my strength to flip it over. I lifted out the oar and inspected the bottom for holes and rotted wood. Seeing none, I gathered up my skirt, climbed in, and paddled to the middle of the pond, an untouchable place, far from everything. I tried to think what I would say to him, worried my voice would slink off again and leave me. I remained there a long while, lapping on the surface. Vapor curled on the water, dragonflies pricked the air, and I thought it all beautiful.

I fell quiet, too. The wooden door onto the courtyard was flung wide onto the Egyptian night. I listened to wind shake the palm fronds. The dark, tumbling world.

Spiritual whittling is an encounter with Mystery, waiting, the silence of inner places—all those things most folks no longer have time for.

and I would feel it, the momentary eclipse. I tell myself it's natural for the feeling to surface now, with the two of

He waited actively—letting go, descending into the depths of his soul, listening, opening himself to change, praying.

What has happened to our ability to dwell in unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with the tensions of uncertainty?

The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.

It was a winter evening like so many others that passed in quiet predictability:

Brother Anthony leaned forward in his chair. "Contemplative waiting is consenting to be where we really are," he explained. "People recoil from it because they don't want to be present to themselves. Such waiting causes a deep existential loneliness to surface, a feeling of being disconnected from oneself and God. At the depths there is fear, fear of the dark chaos within ourselves.

We become what we pay attention to

Jesus sat down at a discreet distance, cross-legged, facing the cave opening. For a long interval we watched the rain and the wild, untethered sky without speaking. The nearness of him, his breathing, the way everything I felt inhabited me—I found rapture in these things, in this being together in the lonely place, and all around the thundering world.

Whether in an advantageous position or a disadvantageous one, the opposite state should be always present to your mind.

How many times in your life could you have abated conflicts if you had taken the time to deliberate on your problems in quiet contemplation—for example, taking a quiet walk—to think about your capabilities and limitations, and the likely gains and losses of taking action? By removing yourself from the immediate, stressful situation, you also take out the emotion that often prompts you to make rash, thoughtless decisions. The

The wise general in his deliberations must consider both favorable and unfavorable factors. He ponders the dangers inherent in the advantages, and the advantages inherent in the dangers. By taking into account the favorable factors, he makes his plan feasible; by taking into account the unfavorable, he may resolve the difficulties. Advantage and disadvantage are mutually reproductive. The enlightened deliberate.