Quotes About Contemplation

Gli passò per la testa, in quei omenti, che anche lui avrebbe potuto sparire nel nulla. Si trattava solo di capire che forma dare a quel nulla.

If we read Dickinson's letters looking for action in the usual sense—where she traveled, what chores she did, whom she encountered—we find some details for reconstructing her days, but not many. But if we read the letters for what the poet thought, her interior world opens.

she also shed her youthful need to exaggerate, flaunt her wit, and trot out erudition. She still sent poems to mark an event or nudge someone to write, but her poems became less about what happened and more about what she was thinking. Poems sent in letters . . . rose above daily concerns to larger contemplations on nature, faith, and loss. Images of boats, sailors, and the view from shore appeared frequently.

I want to read and write and be very quiet.

Looking at the past is like lolling in a rocking chair. It is so relaxing and you can rock back and forth on the porch, and never go forward.

Gurathin sighed and rubbed his face and looked off into the distance, like he regretted all his life choices that had led to him standing here right now.

I needed to have an emotion in private.

Sometimes you have to look into every possibility, even the dumb ones.

Oh, for fuck's sake, I can't sit here and argue with myself all day.

While being eaten would end all his problems, he wasn't quite ready for so final a solution.

originality, foresight, and a wide range of knowledge, to name just a few introverted advantages. Introverts are often the employees

Look at the eyes now -- the eyes of an Old Believer. Part of his mind was away somewhere, dancing with itself.

In order to speak to the world what I have heard, I am not bound to step into the street. I may remain standing in the door of my ancestral house. …

I contemplate a tree. I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground. I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the suckling of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air - and the growing itself in its darkness.

To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.

You can rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way-- it will always be muck. Have I sinned or have I not sinned? In the time I am brooding over it, I could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven

King of Prussia, PA

Use this advice to prod your thinking, but don't use it as a replacement for your thinking. In the end you have to make, and live with, the decisions yourself.

Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation …. Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes

There is no greater work of minimalist art than the dry garden in the Zen Buddhist temple of Ry?an-ji, Kyoto. This comprises fifteen rocks of various sizes set in a sea of white, raked gravel; almost nothing, but you could look at it for hours. It was made about 500 years before the modernist architect Mies van der Rohe remarked that less is more.

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.

To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.