Quotes About Contemplation

W]e cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters. They march to battle. We float with the sticks on the stream; helter-skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn, irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up—to look, for example, at the sky.

Heaven be praised for solitude!

I've done my best to see you as you are, without any of this damned romantic nonsense. That was why I asked you here, and it's increased my folly. When you're gone I shall look out of that window and think of you. I shall waste the whole evening thinking of you. I shall waste my whole life, I believe.

I can sit alone by an open window for hours if I like, and hear only bird songs, and the rustle of leaves. The trees are pure gold and orange

Nothing need be said; nothing could be said.

To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.

When they were alone, they said nothing. They looked at the view; they looked at what they knew, to see if what they knew might perhaps be different today. Most days it was the same.

I like observing people. I like looking at things.

I had tea. I then spent a long time in a bookshop. A quiet evening.

Doesn't it make you melancholy—looking at the stars?

Some people go to priests; others to poetry...I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken.

distant views seemed to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.

Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity.

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.

Better is it', she thought, 'to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the humane spirit, which are', she said aloud as her habit was when deeply moved, 'contemplation, solitude, love.

Looking upwards, she speculates still more ambitiously upon the nature of the moon, and if the stars are blazing jellies; looking downwards she wonders if the fishes know that the sea is salt; opines that our heads are full of fairies, 'dear to God as we are'; muses whether there are not other worlds than ours, and reflects that the next ship may bring us word of a new one. In short, 'we are in utter darkness'. Meanwhile, what a rapture is thought!

I know this room too well - this view too well - I am getting it all out of focus, because I can't walk through it.

Now I will walk, as if I had an end in view, across the room, to the balcony under the awning. I see the sky, softly feathered with its sudden effulgence of moon. I also see the railings of the square, and two people without faces, leaning like statues against the sky. There is then a world immune from change. When I have passed through this drawing room flickering with tongues that cut me like knives, making me stammer, making me lie, I find faces rid of features, robed in beauty.

But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms. These weeks give one a plunge into deep waters. One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth.

Thinking was torment; why not give up thinking, and drift and dream?

It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. There rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one's being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover.

O amor torna a gente solitária, pensou.

Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole.

I was thinking between 3 and 4 this morning, of my 55 years. I lay awake so calm, so content, as if I'd stepped off the whirling world into a deep blue quiet space and there open eyed existed, beyond harm; armed against all that can happen.