Quotes About Contemplation

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately... I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life! To put to rout all that was not life... and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.

There was a shepherd that did live, And held his thoughts as high As were the mounts whereon his flocks Did hourly feed him by.

I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A

The question is not what you look at…but what you see

I want a whole continent to breathe in, and a good deal of solitude and silence, such as all Wall Street cannot buy, — nor Broadway with its wooden pavement. I must live along the beach, on the southern shore, which looks directly out to sea, — and see what that great parade of water means, that dashes and roars, and has not yet wet me, as long as I have lived.

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it.

What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?

Sometimes I would rather get a transient glimpse or side view of a thing than stand fronting to it… The object I caught a glimpse of as I went by haunts my thoughts a long time, is infinitely suggestive, and I do not care to front it and scrutinize it, for I know that the thing that really concerns me is not there, but in my relation to that…

Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading

I went to the woods because I wished to live delibertely, 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 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

L'hésitation est le propre de l'intelligence.

I never reasoned on what I should do, but what I had done; as if my Reason had her eyes behind, and could only see backwards.

Some people have been noted to be able to read in no book but their own.

un poco de filosofía inclina la mente humana al ateísmo, pero una filosofía profunda le conduce a la religión».

If you follow this method with all problems—i.e., thinking a thing out for yourself before looking up what others have thought—you will soon improve your thinking surprisingly.

She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone.

It was the air she wanted and the world she would now exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say 'If I could lose myself here!' There were people, people in plenty, but, admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal question; but she had blissfully left it outside....

Observe perpetually!

And if I wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back.

He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few of them--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures.

He has depths of silence—which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it's always something he has seen or felt for himself—never a bit banal. That would be what one might have feared and what would kill me. But never.