Quotes About Contemplation

He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.

Because that's what it turned into: in front of a fine painting a viewer stopped looking and started watching, watching is more specific, watching is a hunt for something, a search, the way we search for a loved one's boat on the horizon, or an elk in the trees. Before a good painting they started watching for clues to their own life.

he thought he could sit on this deck and watch that stream for the rest of his life.

God, the names. You could almost walk into the words themselves." Now Jack put down his cup. He'd never heard anyone say that and it was true. For a moment he lost the blithe tempo of their conversation that had shielded him from his own shyness.

I lift my head from the pillow I see the frost the moon. Lowering my head I think of home.

You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid.

I flipped through the Duino Elegies

I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.

I stood back of the new garden watching the sun touch the mountains and ruddle the turned dirt and the threads of water and I can say there was something moving inside that resembled a kind of happiness. I would never have named it. Not then. For fear. But I name it now.

Glancing at his notes

of isolation.

G]radually, skillfully, [Parmenides] conjures up the image of us humans as stuck at this place where the road divides—unable to decide between the two paths, incapable even of seeing what the choice involves, just dithering in the space in between.

Twelve months later, as he was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon,