Quotes About Contemplation

From Thérèse's perspective, "they didn't think about death enough, and yet death had paid its visit to a great number of those whom I knew, the young, the rich, the happy

I had no need to raise my head to see and, in fact, no longer raised it but to contemplate heaven which to me was filled with joy. All my trials had come to an end and the winter of my soul had passed on [20]forever.

what an interesting study the world is when one is ready to leave it!

Lider du av sömnlöshet eller jet-lag? - Ingetdera, jag låg och tänkte.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you look up and realize that you're one of those people you see on the train talking to themselves?

and monasticism was an alluring, alternative lifestyle.

The magic moment is a slight quieting, a lull in being busy, a slight staring off, and a hint of calmness.

Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.

It's good to shut up sometimes.

I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire...

the comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had slipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of the boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace!

Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

M. de Charlus persisted in not replying. I thought I could see a smile flicker about his lips: the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men.

Pasaba largas horas encantadoras, a solas consigo mismo, el único invitado que olvidara invitar a comer durante su vida.

real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence

As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.

that distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable...

Which drew from Bloch nothing more instructive than "Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them." "My

With ardent sadness he contemplated the scene of his death for a long time, endlessly revising it like a work of art and surrounding it with images of this world, images that still imbued his thoughts, but that, already slipping away from him in his gradual departure, became vague and beautiful.

La lectura está en el umbral de la vida espiritual; puede introducirnos en ella: no la constituye.

When a mind has a tendency towards day-dreams, it's a mistake to shield it from them, to ration them. So long as you divert your mind from its day-dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will be the victim of all sorts of appearances because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.