Quotes About Contemplation

Questa è la risposta di Orazio, mia cara Lisaweta. 'Considerare le cose in questo modo significherebbe considerarle con troppa precisione,' non è vero?

thought Aschenbach. He's probably not long for this world. And he refused to analyze a certain feeling of satisfaction, or reassurance, which accompanied this thought. He

No meu íntimo dirijo perguntas ao mundo que me cerca, e, escutando, aguardo que se me indique um lugar que me permita enterrar-me longe de todos e, sem que ninguém perturbe, dialogar com minha vida e meu destino...

Und das tat er oder glaubte es zun tun, oder glaubte es auch selber nicht recht, oder, noch bedenklicher, es fing an, ihm gleichgültiger zu werden, ob er es tat oder nicht. (Der Zauberberg)

No, when it came to the ultimate and highest questions, there was no help from outside - no mediation, no absolution, no soothing consolation. Every man had to untangle the riddle on his own, had to work diligently at it, at hot speed, all by himself; before it was too late, he must either achieve some clear readiness for death, or die in despair.

If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.

Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.

The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him.

Whose silence are you?

To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience as joy, as being. [Every form of intuition and experience] die to be born again on a higher level of life.

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night.

Because You have called me here not to wear a label by which I can recognize myself and place myself in some kind of a category. You do not want me to be thinking about what I am, but about what You are. Or rather, You do not even want me to be thinking about anything much: for You would raise me above the level of thought. And if I am always trying to figure out what I am and where I am and why I am, how will that work be done?

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.

Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men.

True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.

Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves.

A man becomes a solitary at the moment when, no matter what may be his external surroundings, he is suddenly aware of his own inalienable solitude and sees that he will never be anything but solitary.

As soon as you are really alone you are with God.

The whole of life is to spiritualize our activities by humility and faith, to silence our nature by charity.

Hence monastic prayer, especially meditation and contemplative prayer, is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him whom we have found, who loves us, who is near to us, who comes to us to draw us to himself.

Monastic prayer begins not so much with "considerations" as with a "return to the heart," finding one's deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being

It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith.