Quotes About Contemplation

Perhaps moksha lies in not thinking about the afterlife.

In a time of famine typified by too many words with too much noise in them, we could use fewer words with more silence in them. This is a difficult concept to grasp, but you know it when you hear it. Some of the most effective language in the world leads you up to the brink of silence and leaves you there, with the soft surf of the unsayable lapping at your feet.

When you have been dead and buried Many things worry you But nothing frightens you.

creating more space for stillness in order to reflect on important decisions.

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

What a strange thing! to be alive beneath cherry blossoms.

O snail Climb Mount Fuji But slowly, slowly!

Reflected in the dragonfly's eye -- mountains.

Green makes me think of silence, or maybe it's loneliness. I get the feeling of a terribly distant star.

Puesto que el que contempla con sus ojos la belleza, no es ya tributario de la muerte, como dice Platen, sino de la Naturaleza, cuya belleza ha comprendido. Y si sus ojos sirven realmente para ver, llegará a ser, inexcusablemente, naturalista.

I sit and gaze like this for a long time, recovering through art from the effort of creating it.

What does everything mean to you right now, this second, while you are looking out at an ocean of possibility?

Death...does this to people. It slaps the living upside the head and it makes us ponder and exchange events and feelings that might stay hidden.

A mystic is anyone who has a gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradiction, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.

Our spiritual lives are where we reckon head-on with the mystery of ourselves, and the mystery of each other.

There's something about being near the ocean that puts your life in perspective. It's reassuring, that's what it is.

The point behind mysticism is not to dazzle the mind with ecstatic wonders or heady feelings, but to foster real and lasting changes, for the purpose of becoming more like Christ, which is to say, more compassionate, more forgiving, more committed to serving others and making the world a better place.

The Christian mystic therefore is one for whom God and Christ are not merely objects of belief, but living facts experimentally known first hand; and mysticism for him becomes, in so far as he responds to its demands, a life based on this conscious communion with God

As if sometimes the world really did amount to a quiet arrangement.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?' . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time—the stuff of life.

One hour a day, one day a month, eight days a year, for longer if necessary, you must leave everything and everybody and retire, alone with God. If you don't look for this solitude, if you don't love it, you won't achieve real contemplative prayer.

Thus, after so many years, I feel I have found the solution to the only real problem we have on earth. I have recognized my powerlessness and this was grace. In faith, hope and love I have contemplated the all-power-fulness of God and this, too, was grace. God can do everything and I can do nothing. But if I offer this nothing in prayer to God, everything becomes possible in me.

With your work finished and the caravan halted, you stretch out on the sand with a blanket under your head and breathe in the gentle breeze which has replaced the dry, fiery daytime wind. Then you leave the camp and go down to the dunes for prayer. Time passes undisturbed. No obligations harass you, no noise disturbs you, no worry awaits you: time is all yours. So you satiate yourself with prayer and silence, while the stars light up in the sky.