Quotes About Contemplation

I wasn't cold, but I was shivering when I walked onto the Clayton Road overpass. I wasn't scared either, even when I climbed over the rail. I didn't feel much of anything.

I looked at the road below. It was a long way down. I focused on the spot where I would probably land, between the white line and the brown gravel. I wondered if it would hurt or if I would die straight away. Then I wondered who would find me. Maybe it would be a truck driver or a shift worker. I felt bad for them.

At night, lying on your back and staring at the falling snow, it's easy to imagine oneself soaring through the stars.

The avid walker Henry David Thoreau said in 1851, "The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.

I wish I could live underwater. Maybe then my skin would absorb the sea's consoling silence.

Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone.

You can support your spiritual-field repair with prayer, meditation, or contemplation. Prayer sends messages to the Divine; meditation quiets the self so it can receive a response. Contemplation is like having tea with God; we can sit and stare into the Divine's eyes forever, basking in this eternal presence, and simply enjoy our own nature.

The other reason why the mind has been regarded with a certain amount

contemplative prayer is simply a wordless, trusting opening of self to the divine presence. Far from being advanced, it is about the simplest form of prayer there is. Children recognize it instantly—as I did—perhaps because, as the sixteenth-century mystic John of the Cross intimates, "Silence is God's first language."1

She supposed she could Google, but she preferred to wonder.

Too often, she looked forward to the end of something—to beginning the remembering—more than the thing itself.

Some people were just meant to be alone.

A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of the free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than to any other form. Like a poem, a genuine essay is made out of lenguage and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance.

No, no, sometimes a person feels to be alone." "If you're alone too much," Persky said, "you think too much." "Without a life," Rosa answered, "a person lives where they can. If all they got is thoughts, that's where they live." "You ain't got a life?" "Thieves took it.

It is closing time in the gardens of the West.

Love means to learn to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things for you are only one thing among many.

Had Beta been French, perhaps he would've been an existentialist, probably though that would not have satisfied him. He smiled contemptuously at mental speculations, for he remembered seeing philosophers fighting over garbage in the concentration camps. Human thought had no significance; subterfuge and self-deception were easy to decipher: all that really counted was the movement of matter.

And who can consent at the mirror to a mere face of man?

At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.

I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.

Si tan solo fuera posible detener un solo instante lo que ocurre en todas partes, congelarlo, contemplarlo como encerrado en una bola de crista, aislándolo del instante anterior y del instante posterior, y transformar así el hilo del tiempo en el océano del espacio. Pero no.

One's action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on.

"Sometimes," said she, "I think that is my permanent feeling towards people. I like the world, the sky and the earth and the greater mystery beyond. But people—yes, they are all monkeys to me."

For all the sirens, game-show buzzers, and drum-rolls of life, it is the nature of men to die quietly.