Quotes About Contemplation

We must not imitate the externals of nature with so much fidelity that the picture fails to evoke that wonderful teasing recurrence of emotion that marks the contemplation of a work of art.

You can actually be bored stiff while you're dying.

I think being still and being silent and finding your own space is so important in this hectic world.

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.

I'm just not a religious person, not at all. I consider myself a spiritual person. I was always very drawn to Buddhism, Hinduism. I still meditate.

I see my work behind the camera as the actualization of a poem. I like to linger on images, conveying things through stillness.

I had a friend who introduced me to a meditation practice which involves a couple of half-hours a day of meditation, where essentially you try to achieve a stillness that allows you to just be there in the moment.

I can be fascinated with very little things. The clouds stimulate my imagination, and sometimes I just sit somewhere and go on dreaming for a long time. Your head is also a computer. When you're dreaming, you are simulating a world in which you are living.

Sting and I need to think what our relationship is to England in the long term.

I have a Manhattan club chair in dark espresso leather that I always read in. It's a place where I can contemplate other people's thoughts and stir my imagination.

I looked at a fetal development chart at the Operation Rescue Office in Dallas. I had a lot of emotions stirring up inside of me. That's when I decided that it was wrong in any stage of pregnancy.

Sixty felt like a big landmark. Not in a dreadful sense, but none of the other birthdays have bothered me. It's got labels on it - OAP, retirement - and I just wanted to take stock. I wanted to be in my greenhouse at home and at least give myself the opportunity of not working again.

My morning runs have become one of the only times I have during the week to reflect and take stock.

When you take stock, there are so many more choices and points of view that are necessary.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.

I have a real problem with stillness. With just stopping and being quiet.

I walk out to my backyard garden at certain times of the year, and I can't get 30 feet without stopping for 20 minutes because the goumis need trimming.

Any person, brought into the presence of this fact, stops for a few moments and remains pensive and silent; and then generally leaves, carrying with him forever a sharper, keener sense of our incessant motion through space.

Is it not truly extraordinary to realise that ever since men have walked, no-one has ever asked why they walk, how they walk, whether they walk, whether they might walk better, what they achieve by walking, whether they might not have the means to regulate, change or analyse their walk: questions that bear on all the systems of philosophy, psychology and politics with which the world is preoccupied? Honoré de Balzac (1938 [1833]:

Hot and overcast. I take my gear out of the car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafés. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.

Meyrueis, Lozère, June 26, 1977. Hot and overcast. I take my gear out of the car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafés. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.

Perhaps with age came a more sedate appreciation of the passage of time.

But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, expect there's still this sound you can't hear.