Quotes About Contemplation

and why the winter suns so rush to bathe themselves in the sea and what slows down the nights to a long lingering crawl...

There they were," she went on, "the stars. And he asked himself, my great-grandfather — that boy: 'What are they? Why are they? And who am I?' as one does, sitting alone, with no one to talk to, looking at the stars.

I am in the mood to dissolve into the sky

At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.

clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.

But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.

Thoughts are divine.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.

I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.

She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.

I will cut adrift—I will sit on pavements and drink coffee—I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim—this fine October.

But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather.

to walk alone in London is the greatest rest.

The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.