Quotes About Contemplation

I went to the Protestant cemetery, and it sounds really morbid, but when I came here, I thought that this is where I want to die. I feel spiritually found here.

Words lose their meaning when you look at them too long. 'God.' 'Science.' Meaning.

shakes alone." Nick

and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.

Solitude and loneliness are two separate things. One you choose out of wisdom, the other out of necessity." -Mark Miller

Ultimately, intellectual work of this sort is its own reward, because it is focused on the only One whose recognition is important, the One before whom all hearts are open.

It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.

Philosophers should be offered condolences rather than encouragement.

On every long run that has gone right, there comes a point where thinking stops and thoughts begin.

The meaning of life — that is something for a simpler time.

On the long run, there is an experience of freedom, of a certain sort — the freedom of spending time with the mind.

Sometimes I wish I could put my whole life on pause...just make everything stop for a while so I can figure shit out.

Now and then I'd catch my mother looking at my like she was thinking about her life, like she was about to say something, but she never did. I didn't expect it. Sometimes it's better not to go back--just settle accounts as they are, call it even.

a moment in the past, like a bone in the throat, that needed his attention.

One of the best things about paintings is their silence — which prompts reflection and random reverie.

I would go out under the stars and enter the smallness of being that was mine, and I would disappear into the emptiness within, and it seemed enormous.

I walk into what light there is — Mark Strand, from "Another Place," Collected Poems (Knopf Doubleday, 2014)

When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.

praying was where you talk to God. And meditation was where you listen.

He'd just sit down, shut his eyes, make this little smile, breathe deep and slow for ten minutes. And then he'd be fine and go back to work. Finally, I asked Kumar if he was praying. He said, no, he was meditating. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. He said praying was where you talk to God. And meditation was where you listen.

He said praying was where you talk to God. And meditation was where you listen.

It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.

I am a great & sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, & all His works must be contemplated with respect.