Quotes About Contemplation

William B. Irvine

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life.

If, despite not having pursued wealth, we find ourselves wealthy, we should enjoy our affluence; it was the Cynics, not the Stoics, who advocated asceticism. But although we should enjoy wealth, we should not cling to it; indeed, even as we enjoy it, we should contemplate its loss. •

Epictetus echoes this advice: We should keep in mind that "all things everywhere are perishable.

The Stoics fell somewhere between the Cyrenaics and the Cynics: They thought people should enjoy the good things life has to offer, including friendship and wealth, but only if they did not cling to these good things. Indeed, they thought we should periodically interrupt our enjoyment of what life has to offer to spend time contemplating the loss of whatever it is we are enjoying. Affiliating

use our reasoning ability to drive away "all that excites or affrights us.

Like Buddhists, Stoics advise us to contemplate the world's impermanence. "All things human," Seneca reminds us, "are short-lived and perishable."19

But if ever there was an argument to be made for the complex, it was sitting before him at this very moment.

I can look at the knot in a piece of wood until it frightens me.

There are things in life we don't understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.

A green world, a scene of green, deep / with light blues, the greens made deep / by those blues. One thinks how / in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen / (through a window, maybe) far behind the serene / sitter's face, the serene pose, as though/in some impossible mirror, face to back, / human serenity gazed at a green world / which gazed at this face.

body bowed forward as though she were

On limestone quarried near the spotBy his command these words are cut:Cast a cold eyeOn life, on death.Horseman, pass by!

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

When one gets quiet, then something wakes up inside one, something happy and quiet like the stars.

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.

I went out to the hazelwood because a fire was in my head.

And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery;

I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death.

The temporal cannot know the Eternal, so to the extent that the Sufi contemplates God in his heart, God Himself is the contemplator: Ultimately, the Witness, the Witnesser, and the Witnessing are all one. (p. 288)

Worse, Lee felt isolated. In Texas he skipped meals with others to avoid "uninteresting men," wishing he was back by his campfire on the plains eating his meals alone.211 He avoided sharing quarters and found that he "would infinitely prefer my tent to my-self."212 In a group he felt more alone than out on the prairie, and that "my pleasure is derived from my own thoughts.

Meditation here may think down hours to moments. Here the heart may give a useful lesson to the head and learning wiser grow without his books.

Meditation here May think down hours to moments. Here the heart May give an useful lesson to the head, And learning wiser grow without his books....

Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men; wisdom in minds attentive to their own.