Quotes About Contemplation

Que não suspeitará da tua perdição mergulhado como agora, a teu lado, na contemplação dessa paisagem interna onde não sabes sequer que lugar ocupas, e nem mesmo se estás nela.

Quando eu olhar a noite enorme do Equador, pensarei se tudo isso foi um encontro ou uma despedida.

Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century.

Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.

First, distraction remains a destroyer of depth.

give your brain the regular doses of quiet it requires to support a monumental life.

As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what's happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds. You can enjoy solitude in a crowded coffee shop, on a subway car, or, as President Lincoln discovered at his cottage, while sharing your lawn with two companies of Union soldiers, so long as your mind is left to grapple only with its own thoughts.

After returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office. "In my retiring room I am by myself," Jung said of the space.

Bollingen Towers;

depth and meaning.

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you're occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates famously conducted "Think Weeks" twice a year, during which he would isolate himself (often in a lakeside cottage) to do nothing but read and think big thoughts.

Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights

Motivated by these historical lessons, we too should embrace walking as a high quality source of solitude.

your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to, so consider for a moment the type of mental world constructed when you dedicate significant time to deep endeavors.

In July, Thoreau moved into the cabin where he then lived for the next two years. In the book Walden, he wrote about this experience, famously describing his motivation as follows: "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.

Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to

toward distracting behavior, because in an Internet-centric technopoly such behavior is not up for discussion.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," Blaise Pascal

Lincoln's time alone with his thoughts played a crucial role in his ability to navigate a demanding wartime presidency. We can therefore say, with only mild hyperbole, that in a certain sense, solitude helped save the nation.

Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea." This advice comes from Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges, a Dominican friar and professor of moral philosophy, who during the early part of the twentieth century penned a slim but influential volume titled The Intellectual Life.

I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. Spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.

To really understand nature, we have to do more than glance, and we have to think beyond our knee-jerk reaction that insists since we make things with intent, nature must also be made with intent. If we want to understand better than a child, we have to look harder, and think deeper.