Quotes About Contemplation

When the soul communes with itself the lip is silent.

You know There are moments when silence, prolonged and unbroken, More expressive may be than all words ever spoken.

Three things are ever silent--Thought, Destiny, and the Grave.

The fascination of trifles obscures the good," says the Wise Man. It is difficult in the midst of much doing and seeing to keep alive and present to the deepest reality, to the really real. And so the monk goes apart…

windows"—a brainstorm that had hit Kay one day while he was in the shower, his favorite place to think.

black Catholic theology must be at once critically political and deeply mystical.

Ben Espey sat at his desk and looked over his notes.

A pause here as the people around the fire, predominately male, contemplated the amputation of their entire sex for the sin of having external genitalia.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare." -Kenko Yoshida

E)very soul requires secret places for contemplation as well as open spaces for celebration.

Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.

I know what I wish. I wish some Day that I might live by a River — one that is strong of current & silent; & above it, in the Pines, the Hawks shall call; & I shall live there in a small House of one Room & play the Violin, & Someone Else shall play the Harpsichord, & we will be far from all Human Habitation. We shall walk by the Banks of that River, & listen to the Buzzing of the Rushes, & that alone shall be our Company.

I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence. I do not know what we may do, to know another better.

I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.

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All uncleanness seems washed clean in its lonely stretches ; the life-giving sun and ardent air must still bring singular joy, the eager morning breeze, the opalescent distance, the plaintive evening sky all will continue to tell an exquisite if inarticulate story. That Tripoli will remain, whatever the Powers may decree.

God, why do I storm heaven for answers that are already in my heart? Every grace I need has already been given me. Oh, lead me to the Beyond within.

Whatever truth you have chosen, read only a small portion of it, endeavouring to taste and digest it, to extract the essence and substance thereof, and proceed no farther while any savour or relish remains in the passage: when this subsides, pick up your book again and proceed as before, seldom reading more than half a page at a time, for it is not the quantity that is read, but the manner of reading, that yields us profit.

Some persons, when they hear of the prayer of silence, falsely imagine that the soul remains stupid, dead, and inactive. But unquestionably, it acteth therein more nobly and more extensively than it had ever done before; for God himself is the mover, and the soul now acteth by the agency of His spirit.

If while reading, you feel yourself recollected, lay aside the book and remain in stillness; at all times read but little, and cease to read when you're thus internally attracted.

The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.

Solitude can reshape your life. Like a river that gets cut off from the sea. You think it's moving somewhere, but it's not. You can drown inside yourself.

It's only now, in hindsight, that I think she saw her own disappearance as a quality to be desired. That perhaps she needed, finally, to live unobserved.

did I yearn for a new eye as a window to the outside world, or for the world to look in on me?