Quotes About Contemplation

When you're on your last legs, whether you're confined to a bed or screaming in a crashed-up car, many things may occur to you. Something that won't occur to you, either confined to a bed or screaming, is that it doesn't matter what you did or didn't do during your existence.

You see how I live: shadows and silence, leaving things as I find them because I have no reason to disturb them. But there are things that I have known, even though I never wished to know them and cannot give them a name.

I sat on the bank, holding the stone, and tried to list to myself the motions that were at that moment acting upon it: the Earth's 700-miles-per-hour spin around its axis, its 67,000-miles-per-hour orbit about the sun, its slow precessional straightening tilt within inertial space, and, containing all of that, the galaxy's own inestimable movement outward in the deep night of space.

Sometimes I stand among the stones and wonder. Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I weep. Sometimes nothing at all much happens. Life goes on. The dead are everywhere.

Thoughts come clearly while one walks.

As I face new water, I always ask myself if I ought to fish with a nymph or not. Presumably you don't walk directly into rising trout. Camus said that the only serious question is whether or not to commit suicide. This is rather like the nymph question. It takes weight, a weighted fly, split shot. Casting becomes a matter of spitting this mess out and being orderly about it.

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.

Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.

We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.

[W]hen the faculties are empty, then your whole being listens.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to -- find out both the questions and the answers.

But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.

Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.

FRANCISCUS: How sweetly she looks! Oh, but there's a wrinkle in her brow as deep as philosophy.

But it seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.

As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.

Objects are so far from diminishing, that they magnify the faculties of the soul beholding them. A sand in your conception conformeth your soul, and reduceth it to the size and similitude of a sand, A tree apprehended is a tree in your mind; the whole hemisphere and the heavens magnify your soul to the wideness of the heavens; all the spaces above the heavens enlarge it wider to their own dimensions. And what is without limit maketh your conception illimited and endless.

He drifted, dreamed; and dreamed some more.

she rose and drifted about the room at length, clasping and unclasping her hands, pressing them to her temples as if she would seal in certain broodings which lay hidden there.

He felt his jaw again, wiggling it back and forth, then nodding. "And now you'll be tellin' me they started

We pray most fervently when we pray most feelingly.

A Christian without meditation is like a soldier without weapons, or a workman without tools.

is the soul's retiring of itself, that by a serious and solemn thinking upon God, the heart may be raised up to heavenly affections.