Quotes About Contemplation

If someone asks me what I did last year, I can safely answer that I smoked.

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.

Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment.

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.

This [Ghost Ranch] is my kind of world. The kind of things one sees in cities . . . well, you know, it's better to look out the window at the sage.

I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.

To see takes time.

Lying spread-eagled in the silky water, gazing into the sky, only moving my hands and feet slightly to keep afloat, I was looking at the Milky Way stretched like a chiffon scarf across the sky and wondering how many stars it contained. I could hear the voices of the others, laughing and talking on the beach, echoing over the water

It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness. – SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It

escaped to the veranda, where he stood in the moonlight taking deep breaths.

Es la vida la que va frenando a los ojos de uno. Todo se hace más pausado, por así decirlo, y al contemplar las cosas a cámara lenta se aprecia mucho más. ¡Qué cosas se ven entonces! ¡Qué cosas tan extraordinarias se revelan a nuestro alrededor, que antes ni siquiera habíamos sospechado! ¡Es verdaderamente una aventura encantadora, deliciosa!

the dark night is nothing other than our ongoing relationship with the Divine.

It was the recommendation of John of the Cross (in a manner similar to that of Gamaliel) that one should not pay particular attention to any phenomena or experiences. If an experience were truly and directly of God, he felt, its truth would become evident naturally in one's life. If it were of something "else," it would certainly not be worthy of attention. Therefore, no special attention was necessary.

Chapels are emergency rooms for the soul. They are the one place we can reliably go to find who we are and what we should be doing with our lives—usually by finding all we aren't, and what is much greater than us, to which we can only give ourselves up.

It was a year when Frankie thought about the world. And she did not see it as a round school globe, with the countries neat and different-coloured. She thought of the world as huge and cracked and loose and turning a thousand miles an hour.

Inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly and all the time.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

My body has certainly wandered a good deal, but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough.

The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure.

Leisure is the mother of philosophy.

To be a good diarist, one must have a little snouty, sneaky mind.