Quotes About Contemplation

Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath.

one of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind's imagining into another

Then felt I like like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Like stout Cortes when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific-and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise Silent upon a peak in Darien

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity...

I was too much in solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only resource.

Oh ye! Who have your eye-balls vexed and tired, Feast them upon the wideness of the sea

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death.

But what, without the social thought of thee, Would be the wonders of the sky and sea?

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs

I should like the window to open onto the Lake of Geneva--and there I'd sit and read all day like the picture of somebody reading.

Upon the honey'd middle of the night

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Do I believe the total perversion that I am witnessing?

Get out of that womb-house for at least an hour a day. Take a walk, Ignatius. Look at the trees and birds. Realize that life is surging all around you. The valve closes because it thinks it is living in a dead organism. Open your heart and you will open your valve.

I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.

moved by his own sermon.

Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.

And so this is Christmas...what have you done?

Doing fine. Watching shadows on the wall.

Reverie is when ideas float in our mind without reflection or regard of the understanding.

It is so much easier to believe than to think; it is astounding how much more believing is done than thinking.

of how amidst near-utter chaos a few men sought the coolness of contemplation, the utter calm that precedes not philosophizing but grim, determined action.

Yet the story of the 1918 influenza virus is not simply one of havoc, death, and desolation, of a society fighting a war against nature superimposed on a war against another human society. It is also a story of science, of discovery, of how one thinks, and of how one changes the way one thinks, of how amidst near-utter chaos a few men sought the coolness of contemplation, the utter calm that precedes not philosophizing but grim, determined action.