Quotes About Contemplation

Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Poetry is not a code to be broken but a way of seeing with the eyes shut.

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

A song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.

I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.

Poetry is the dark side of the moon.

In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts.

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.

Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

Solitude is an essential element of poetry.

Poetry is on earth to make you serene, not corrupt your mind, thoughts,or emotions

A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.

This, in the end, might be the greatest social good of poetry: to get us to live differently, with a different sort of thinking and concentration, even if it's just for a few moments.

One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.

I think poetry is best read to oneself.

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity.

there are so many dayswhen living stops and pulls up and sitsand waits like a train on the rails.

...make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came." Wendell Berry

Here in this endless and gleaming wildernessI was removed farther than ever from the world of men --And I never saw so close and so clearlyThe image in the mirror of my own soul.

In the shade of words sits life itself.