Quotes About Contemplation

Emma drew in the dirt with a stick, making curlicues and unconsciously tracing Connor's initials. GC. GC. She frowned. She wondered if he had a middle name. She'd never asked. "Emma!

She's not stupid. She just never lets her mind out.

Tell me, do you sometimes find yourself unaccountably sad on some days?

There is a way of beholding nature that is itself a form of prayer.

Consider the inner garden, that secret glade filled with day dreams, feelings, and memories. Sometimes they can be made physical, a goal of metaphysical gardening. Otherwise they remain mere reflections in a gazing ball.

For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

remember pondering for a long time over a dish of scrambled egg. What did it mean? It could mean anything. I ate a few mouthfuls and pushed the plate away. In this long, undifferentiated lapse of time, there were a few incidents that stood out. I noted them at the time, separately from the story, and they are worth recalling here.

The cat was on the window ledge, gazing intently into the garden.

turn all the mirrors to the wall.

I left wide margins. In the left-hand one I noted any mannerisms, expressions and gestures that seemed to add something to her meaning. The right-hand margin I left blank. Later, rereading, it was here that I would enter my own thoughts, comments, questions.

Thought before action, if you have time

Those are serious questions. Let me avoid them as best I can.

When we are chopping onions, we should be chopping onions only, right there, right then, at the chopping board, as if the onions, the knife, and our hands were all that existed.

It's odd how different a house feels when one is alone in it. It makes it easier to think rather private thoughts...

I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame...

Thinking of death--strange, beautiful, terrible and a long way off--made me feel happier than ever.

It is odd how different a house feels when one is alone in it.

As long as I live I shall remember that silent minute.

It is the still, yellow kind of afternoon when one is apt to get stuck in a dream if one sits very quiet

There's nothing more, except that I usually sit down until the flames die down and try to think myself back into the past.

Once I really looked at the sky, I wanted to go on looking; it seemed to draw me towards it and make me listen hard, though there was nothing to listen to, not so much as a twig was stirring.

Contemplation seems to be the only luxury that costs nothing.

Abandonnez les offrandes d'encens, les prosternations, le nenbutsu, la pratique du repentir et la lecture des sutras : restez simplement assis (shikantaza).

There are people with their hands in their hair, holding in their brains.