Quotes About Contemplation

Something about lying on our backs staring up at the heavens...opens the mind.

A medida que el viejo funicular ascendía lentamente la pendiente vertiginosa, Edmond Kirsch contemplaba la cumbre irregular de la montaña.

Mr. Langdon, I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believed in God. There is a difference. Holy scripture is stories . . . legends and history of man's quest to understand his own need for meaning. I am not asking you to pass judgment on literature. I am asking if you believe in God. When you lie out under the stars, do you sense the divine? Do you feel in your gut that you are staring up at the work of God's hand?

How good it felt to be alone, stacking blocks. That's what came to him again, a kind of weight solidifying in his chest: how much he had loved to be alone - to be outside of his own life, a giant, sentient cloud looming over his imaginary city, hovering above it. There was a certain kind of blank omniscience that felt like his true self, at last.

Then he began to see through too many things. He cogitated all the hope out of his life, which of course is the danger.

He was a thinker, but also a man of action.

when profound questions are asked of the heart, the answers are best kept to yourself.

Did you see any of us there?" Kassad said nothing for more than a minute. The soft sounds of the river and the ship's rigging suddenly seemed very loud. Finally Kassad took a breath. "Yes." Silence stretched again. Brawne Lamia broke it. "Will you tell us who?" "No.

Meina Gladstone sat at the head of the long table and felt the peculiar and not-unpleasant sense of separateness which comes from far too little sleep over far too long a period.

Dad," said Rachel, "I'm going to ask you a question I've asked about a million times since I was two. Do you believe in God?" Sol had not smiled. He had no choice but to give her the answer he had given her a million times. "I'm waiting to," he said.

ponderously

emptiness is a good sign; that it presages openness to a new level of awareness, new insights, new experiences.

I had long since learned that to read about the follies and scandals of the world was to desecrate the morning.

We all retreat into ourselves in some way.

Sounds like

Everyday is filled with opportunities to take a quiet moment

I'm curious how someone...finds God, or solace, or peace or whatever it is he finds out here alone...while he's reciting words. Is it just a matter of believing what you say?

ritual that allows me to enter a contemplative place—a place in which I might come upon something wordless and profound. Maybe the rituals are a doorway to prayer. But I spent most of my life confusing them with prayer itself.

late at night once

I had set the Evening wholly apart to consider seriously about it, and was all alone; for already People had, as it were by a general Consent, taken up the Custom of not going out of Doors after Sun-set, the Reasons I shall have Occasion to say more of by-and-by.

Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.

Los pensamientos obsesivos son la leña que alimenta el fuego de la ira, un fuego que sólo podrá extinguirse contemplando las cosas desde un punto de vista diferente

Some time is needed to grasp the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. The more distracted we are, the less we can cultivate the subtler forms of empathy and compassion.

Meditation is a catch-all word for myriad varieties of contemplative practice, just as sports refers to a wide range of athletic activities. For both sports and meditation, the end results vary depending on what you actually do.