Quotes About Contemplation

More than half the candle remained. She could read an hour before it guttered, longer if she took another candle from the drawer. How many had she burned already this month? Her hours of night reading seemed to grow ever more necessary, for each day's study compelled her to explore these volumes further, and with a fierce attention impossible when others were about.

Thomas watched wealth, it struck Ester, the way some men watched a sunset.

What sort of life is possible—with no ground beneath one's feet except the logic of one's own mind?

For is not life solitary, and every thinker lonely?

Yet to die alone would be honest. For is not life solitary, and every thinker lonely?

What sort of life is possible--with no ground beneath one's feet except the logic of one's own mind?

Philosophy could be severed from life.

There remained the sea, which is free to all, and particularly alluring to those who feel themselves at war with humanity.

Some people like to hear themselves talk, but I like to hear myself silent.

I needed more time to think. And a better brain with which to do the thinking.

I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.

The trouble with the what-if game was that once you began to play it, you couldn't just quit whenever you wanted. From one what-if grew another.

Being alone can be good. It is easy to find peace alone. But sometimes...being alone is a kind of death.

He turns to consider them with disapproval.

Now comes the evening of the mind. Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood. —Donald Justice, "The Evening of the Mind

at that point when friends and loved ones began to pass away ever more frequently. The essential loneliness that was a key thread in the weave of life, which everyone strove not to think about, now became a truth that she could no longer avoid considering.

Darkness was conducive to contemplation.

In her countless long walks over these one hundred and thirty acres

Now, as she turns away from the water, intending to go to the house to have a glass of wine

Poor Clares.

Without a window between me and this absolute-black sky, the effect of such undetailed heavens was profound, frightening not just because of the uncanny darkness but also for a reason that eluded me. Or perhaps the reason was not elusive. Maybe I dreaded acknowledging and considering it, for fear that contemplation would soon sweep me out of the main currents of sanity, into a tributary of madness.

And I think a lot more than I used to." "I wouldn't recommend thinking too much." "I don't carry it so far as brooding." "Even pondering is sometimes too far.

TUESDAY, 30 DECEMBER

After the slightest hesitation, Lindblom says