Quotes About Contemplation

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

You're getting to be a big boy,' I said desperately, 'it's time you started thinking about your future.' 'I'm thinking about my future,' said Sonny, grimly. 'I think about it all the time.

Souvenez vous, she tells me. One must make a little prayer from time to time.

John looked with a child's impenetrable gravity into the preacher's face, as though he were turning this question over in his mind and would answer when he had thought it

Men are men, and sometimes they must be left alone.

There are times when we stop, we sit still. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things...but there are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen, and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

Before we get too wrapped around the axle

It is sometimes wise to be abstract.

I want no thunder or lightning to remind me of my God, nor am I as apt to bethink on most of all His goodness in trouble and tribulations as on a calm, solemn, quiet day in a forest, when His voice is heard in the creaking of a dead branch or in the song of a bird, as much in my ears at least as it is ever heard in uproar and gales.

We meditate that we might learn to see through Christ's eyes the divine mystery of all that surrounds us.

ways of prayer often call forth a kind of knowing that passes beyond clear ideas and the ordinary way of thinking.

desire to practice meditation means you are being blessed in a most extraordinary way. You are being led into the waters of meditative awareness, in which hermits, monks and nuns living in monasteries, and countless devout women and men living in the world have found a deep and abiding

Prayer begins to take on its full dimensions only when we begin to intuit that the subtle nothingness of prayer is everything.

I often think of death. True. Suicide is a reasonable option. True. My sins are unpardonable. I stare at the question. My sins are unpardonable. I stare at the question. My sins are unpardonable. I leave it blank.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

I'm not religious. I'm not an atheist. Would I say I'm an agnostic? Possibly. But I would say the collective unconscious is something I'm much more interested in.

From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.

Meditation is to get insight, to get understanding and compassion, and when you have them, you are compelled to act.

Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.

Reverie is when ideas float in our mind without reflection or regard of the understanding.

Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'

As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.

When undertaking marriage, everyone must be the judge of his own thoughts, and take counsel from himself.