Quotes About Contemplation

I fold my hands under my head and tell the books all about you. They listen, Beck. I know it sounds crazy, but they do.

Real blues shut you down and shut you up.

Sometimes we all need a poem.

You don't know how to be alone with yourself. And if you block out the world, there you'd be.

She had a kind of internal reserve, an astonishing capacity for self-comfort, and she handled solitude more effectively than almost anyone I knew. She could spend whole days by herself — painting, knitting, reading; losing herself in art and craft and intellect.

the silence of God is God.

Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air.

she wondered what she had done to deserve the loneliness that seemed to surround her.

I)t is in curiosity, first, and then in knowledge and reflection that freedom rests.

I was sitting by myself the other night doing the usual things one does when spending time alone with yourselves. You know, making mountains out of molehills, hiking up to the top of the mountains, having a Hostess Twinkie and then throwing myself off the mountain. Stuff like that.

She wondered if she was in the midst of an anecdote that, for reasons of proximity, she was not yet able to perceive.

We all have to feel empty sometimes.

Sometimes I suffer from indigestion of the mind.

In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.

She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.

In this great fiat of the little girl Mary, the strength and foundation of our life of contemplation is grounded, for it means absolute trust in God, trust which will not set us free from suffering but will set us free from anxiety, hesitation, and above all from the fear of suffering. Trust which makes us willing to be what God wants us to be, however great or however little that may prove. Trust which accepts God as illimitable Love.

In our seeking for the lost Child, our contemplation of Our Lady becomes active. The fiat was complete surrender. Advent was a folding upon the life growing in our darkness. Now the seeking is a going out from ourselves. It is a going out from our illusions, our limitations, our wishful thinking, our self-loving, and the self in our love.

No one can be so recollected, so tranquil, that he can be a contemplative in the world, a contemplative of Christ in his own heart, unless at the very outset he finds a cure for fear.

Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within.

I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full; I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensible for my dialogue with nature.

He thought about himself, and the whole Earth, Of Man the wonderful, and of the Stars, And how the deuce they ever could have birth; And then he thought of Earthquakes, and of Wars, How many miles the Moon might have in girth, Of Air-balloons, and of the many bars To perfect Knowledge of the boundless Skies; And then he thought of Donna Julia's eyes.

Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be. [First published, Childe Harold, 1812

Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone.

I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.