Quotes About Contemplation

I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end.

You hear yourself walking on the snow. You hear the absence of the birds. A stillness so complete, you hear the whispering inside of you. Alone morning after morning, and even more at night. They say we are born alone, to live and die alone. But they are wrong. We get to be alone by time, by luck, or by misadventure. — Jack Gilbert, from "Betrothed," Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)

mind and went

Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.

Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.

My witness is the empty sky.

Skill in concentrating and steadying the mind is the basis for all types of meditation.

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather around us, that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even a fiercer life because of our quiet. William Butler Yeats

Religion is like having children, or taking medicine, or eating, or any of a thousand other perfectly rational human activities: Taken in small doses, it has much to recommend it. One need only avoid going overboard.

I'm Irish. I think about death all the time.

Once a year, lock your office door and leave for a "think week"—ideally to a remote location with ample exposure to Mother Nature—and ruminate about the "day after tomorrow.

The passport to a better life is to think about your death occasionally.

No friend is better than your own wise heart!" Genghis Khan

Being still and doing nothing are two completely different things.

thinking that this conversation was going

How bizarre, i think to myself, to be on a train and to actually not want to arrive anywhere? What kind of madness is that?

You noticed things. You're not sure when you start. It's only when you've noticed - noticed that you know you've noticed. Maybe between the first time when you're staring to think, Is this what I think it is? and the second time when you think, Yes, between those two times, there's a silence. A pause.

And, sometimes, such stories, dreams, can only be told in questions, can only be found in answers.

Can they hear the stars, here where they lie in the hollow?

The day that she stopped speaking was the day she began to understand so much more about the world around her, to appreciate the many textures of silence. She learned to listen.

I love to read. I love to stretch. In the morning, I get up, and if I'm not in a hurry, I will lie on the floor on a rug, look through some books and magazines, and maybe listen to music and try to do stretching exercises to tune up.

These days I sit on corner stones And count the time in quarter tones to ten, my friend Don't confront me with my failures I had not forgotten them

I love her bare legs from a distance. When she's standing by a pool. When she's facing the water, thinking. Her legs are white as watermelon rind, veined blue from cold. There's that 'H' shape behind her knees. The H trembles softly with the swimming-water cold.

Life is just a mirror, and what you see out there, you must first see inside yourself.