Quotes About Meditation

We must slow down to a human tempo and we'll begin to have time to listen.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life itself solves them for you. Usually the solution consists in a discovery that they only existed insofar as they were inseparably connected with your own illusory exterior self.

I should be able to return to solitude each time as to the place I have never described to anybody, as the place which I have never brought anyone to see, as the place whose silence has mothered an interior life known to no one but God alone.

Thomas Merton

The sharpest of natural experiences is like sleep, compared with the awakening which is contemplation. The keenest and surest natural certitude is a dream compared to this serene comprehension.

But in the actual experience of contemplation all other experiences are momentarily lost. They "die" to be born again on a higher level of life.

Thus, just about the time when I most needed it, I did acquire a little natural faith, and found many occasions of praying and lifting up my mind to God.

But there is nothing to prevent a layman from taking just one Psalm a day, for instance in his night prayers, and reciting it thoughtfully, pausing to meditate on the lines which have the deepest meaning for him.

True solitude is the home of the person, false solitude the refuge of the individualist.

Thomas Merton

Go into the desert not to escape other men but in order to find them in God.

writing these things down, they clarify themselves, they move in words and sentences, and so take shape while in my own mind they are formless and not articulate.

Possibly, what is required of some of us, and chiefly of me, is a solitary and personal response in the form of nonacquiescence, but quiet, definite and pure.

Had I ever read the Life of St. Bernard by Dom Ailbe Luddy?—

My life is a listening, His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond. For this, my life must be silent. Hence, my silence is my salvation.

At this deep level of personal myth and innate constitution, spirituality and psychology overlap and conjoin. For that reason, paying close attention to dreams aids any spiritual activity, keeping it grounded and in contact with the elements that have shaped you. Dream work becomes as important as meditation, quiet reading, and prayer, and fits tightly into a developed spiritual way of life.

Taking an interest in one's own soul requires a certain amount of space for reflection and appreciation.

Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do

Philosophick Work, to proceed at all smartly, wouldn't you agree, requires a controll'd working-space.

Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity.

Folks out here talk about fate, but for Kit it was a matter of stillness.

could see that fatty mind grinding and figuring.

It doesn't matter how smart you are, unless you stop and think.

I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write