Quotes About Contemplation

I am a tea, he thought. I am some kind of tea. And I have wishes.

She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.

but the truth is, the more hours I spend in contemplation, the less I know about God-and the more I realize how arrogant it is for us poor humans to squeeze the Infinite into our limited definitions.

Death is always on its way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life....we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times...How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet is all seems limitless.

These empty days. How do you spend them?

One can only worry so much, however; then one becomes philosophical. I suppose philosophy is merely sublimated worry.

Men were looking at her, but with neither sympathy nor antipathy. Nor even with curiosity, she thought. They had the absorbed and vacant expression of the man who looks into his handkerchief after blowing his nose.

The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it's having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels. Do you understand?

You must watch the universe as it cracks over your head.

philosophy is "the love of wisdom.

Everyone is a philosopher." Everyone takes a philosophical view of things—a worldview, some call it—even if their philosophical assumptions are subconscious and unexplored.

To get there, we have to kill mellow-yellow, docile, unemotional, Lotus-sitting Jesus, drinking kombucha and finding us little humans mildly amusing while trying to clear his head of conflict and division, "contemplating all," as Tennyson put it.

There is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question

If you would experience a landscape, you must go alone into it and sit down somewhere quietly and wait for it to come in its own good time to you.

why can't I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn't stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this.

Flower in the Crannied Wall Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.

Nobody knows how to just shut the fuck up and look out the window anymore.

Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.

Even when I'm not looking for a meaning one springs naturally to my mind. Do you think it is a disease?

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

Ambassador Noyes had another trait I had noticed in many slow-witted people: he was tremendously interested in philosophy.

It seems to me that there is always something luminous in the face of a person in the act of reading.

was questioning one of the cardinal precepts of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.

spent the rest of the morning in the gardens on my own, loving the solitude