Quotes About Contemplation

Gazing is probably the best word to touch the core of Eastern spirituality. Whereas St. Benedict, who has set the tone for the spirituality of the West, calls us first of all to listen, the Byzantine fathers focus on gazing

In solitude we become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness." - Out of Solitude

Solitude is the furnace in which transformation takes place.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.

A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.

I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

Direct your eye inward, and you'll find / A thousand regions in your mind / Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be / Expert in home-cosmography

let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.

You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only, as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?

The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.

The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours …but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.

I love a broad margin to my life.

Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself.

Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world.

What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?