Quotes About Contemplation

I didn't say anything. I lit my pipe again. It makes you look thoughtful when you're not thinking.

Wherever I went, whatever I did, this was what I would come back to. A blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house.

I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with it.

He leaned his back against the workbench and looked me over without haste, without interest, as if he was looking at a slab of cold meat. Perhaps he thought of people that way.

Then I sat there holding the neck of the cool bottle and wondering how it would feel to be a homicide dick and find bodies lying around and not mind at all, not have to sneak out wiping doorknobs, not have to ponder how much I could tell without hurting a client and how little I could tell without too badly hurting myself. I decided I wouldn't like it.

I filled and lit my pipe and sat there smoking. Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso.

I went over to a floor lamp and pulled the switch, went back to put off the ceiling light, and went across the room again to the chessboard on a card table under the lamp. There was a problem laid out on the board, a six-mover. I couldn't solve it, like a lot of my problems.

I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a

Seconds slowed and passed before Nicholas's mind's eye like a parade of snails upon the garden path.

He stood staring at the water as it rippled and calmed. It was the only thing Daylon could see that wasn't covered in death; all around him, the mud of the battlefield was awash in piss, shit, and blood, pieces of what had once been brave men, and the muck covered banners of fools.

Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.

And the freest of all is the philosopher who thinks so little of the ceaseless flow of time as to step out of it. This is why the philosopher often appears ridiculous in the practical affairs of life, because he or she has stepped out of the rush of time.

epimeleia heautou

Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience.

Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.

Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. [--] [T]ime spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space—for wilderness and for public space—must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.

I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.

Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.

Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.

Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts

Walking is a state in which the mind, body, and the world are aligned… it produces thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

stayed there for a restorative year of catching my breath and looking around and not being desperate for time or money.