Quotes About Contemplation

The solitary is necessarily a man who does what he wants to do," wrote Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk who died in 1968. "In fact, he has nothing else to do. That is why his vocation is both dangerous and despised.

I am retreating into silence as a defensive mode,

You would rather think about the good than do it.

Dü?ünmenin alternatifi duygular de?il, dü?ünmemektir.

Maybe you can only go back in your mind?

Midnight on Wednesdays

Boys need to learn the value of spiritual solitude. For the soul to grow, it needs those moments of no-stimulation, of wakeful peace. Because we adults don't usually practice enough solitude—because we are always 'doing' things—we often neglect to teach our boys to find solitude

Sit in silence and the world is yours.

Look at it this way, that way, face the thing squarely. Could some fool in a laboratory, he'd asked his assistants, Blow up the world with this? You could pay dearly For probing too deeply into that dark resistance Where light lay coiled in stone. He

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful that God has implanted in the human soul. — JOHANN WOLFGANG

Questions needed to be asked: What could happen if I did this? Is there any other way to think about this? What possibilities exist that I haven't thought of yet?

If moral reflection consists in seeking a fit between the judgments we make and the principles we affirm, how can such reflection lead us to justice, or moral truth?

Sometimes I wonder if we live life by reliving life, rather than by living life.

we're all thinkin' it.

God help us to live slowly: To move simply: To look softly: To allow emptiness: To let the heart create for us. Amen.

Come sit down beside me, I said to myself, And although it doesn't make sense, I held my own hand As a small sign of trust And together I sat on the fence.

Waiting on God is hard when you are dispirited by illness. But part of waiting on God, learning to be passive in a way creative for your inner life, is not a question of thinking about God, but of growing in stillness. It has to do with prayer, and with music or from the simple contemplation of the world about you.

Daylight had not brought a solution, but it had accorded indifference. Having

Soul is found where life deepens us, where meaning calls to us, where trouble deters us, wherever and however we slow down in the midst of the rushing and racing at the surface level of life.

Whenever I am confused about what to do in life, I quietly sit down and think about where I have been and compare this to where I might want to go in future. The answer to the next step just comes to me from inside myself.

As I work in the afternoon on committing to paper some of my morning's thoughts, I find myself just about to close on the knotty question of whether or not I believe in God. In fact I am about to type, 'I do not believe in God', when the sky goes black as ink, there is a thunderclap and a huge crash of thunder and a downpour of epic proportions. I never do complete the sentence.

country highway. He sensed that he was

or works along its rim with busy fingers like a string of prayer beads.

Learn to listen to this silence, because it will tell you many things, unimaginable things, things of great beauty and meaning.