Contemplation Quotes

Jonathan Harnisch

I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark - the perfect time for creativity.

Anne Sexton

Put your mouthful of words away
and come with me to watch
the lilies open in such a field,
growing there like yachts,
slowly steering their petals
without nurses or clocks.

R. N. Prasher

Words, with their multiple meanings and nuances are like trees and oral communication like a forest. Trees are good for hiding, forest for losing the path. When one is trying to contemplate the horizon of illusion and reality, trees and forests can offer no help.

Anthony Liccione

One can talk good and shower down roses, but it's the receiver that has to walk
One can talk good and shower down roses, but it's the receiver that has to walk through the thorns, and all its false expectations.

Richelle E. Goodrich

The written word can make one pause and contemplate. It can make a reader sigh to dream or question a belief in considerable depth.  But all of that is nothing if those words fail to touch the heart and make one feel.

Russell Kirk

It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Sitting to think of what to write will only set your ass on fire, give you headache, twist your face to look stupid, instead, walk around with a blank mind and something from somewhere will fill it up.

Carl Sandburg

It is necessary ... for a man to go away by himself ... to sit on a rock ... and ask, 'Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?

Stephen R. Covey

Perhaps a sense of possessing needs to come before a sense of genuine sharing. Many people who give mechanically or refuse to give and share in their marriages and families may never have experience what it means to possess themselves, their own sense of identity and self-worth.

Josef Pieper

The happy man needs nothing and no one. Not that he holds himself aloof, for indeed he is in harmony with everything and everyone; everything is "in him"; nothing can happen to him. The same may also be said for the contemplative person; he needs himself alone; he lacks nothing.

Josef Pieper

The ultimate meaning of the active life is to make possible the happiness of contemplation.

Josef Pieper

The happy life does not mean loving what we possess, but possessing what we love." Possession of the beloved, St. Thomas holds, takes place in an act of cognition, in seeing, in intuition, in contemplation.

Josef Pieper

The common element in all the special forms of contemplation is the loving, yearning, affirming bent toward that happiness which is the same as God Himself, and which is the aim and purpose of all that happens in the world.

Ray Simpson

Contemplative prayer is natural, unprogrammed; it is perpetual openness to God, so that in the openness his concerns can flow in and out of our minds as he wills.

Yoshida Kenkō

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare.

Tahir Shah

Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.

Sam Wineburg

As historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to TALK with their texts. In plain English, they pretend to deliberate with others by talking to themselves.

C.S. Lewis

He may really have been enjoying an embryonic composition of his own stimulated by mere hints in the book.

Ray Simpson

Many questing young people and stressed older people nowadays seek relaxation through meditation. They look for it in Hindu, Buddhist and other Eastern religions. They are often surprised to learn that there is such a way within the Christian tradition, a way that is known as contemplation.

Ramon M. Torres

Christianity is more than just a belief; it is a life of discipline, a firm determination to live a life of prayer and contemplation, a life of self-denial and Christlikeness.

Jane Austen

When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.

Angie Karan Krezos

Breathe light into your body - breathe light into your Heart - Breathe light into your mind - Breathe and OPEN! Breathe and remember that you are all LIGHT - Infinite LIGHT -Blessed LIGHT- open your heart and SHINE ON!●•٠·˙

Laurence Gonzales

The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.

Donald Miller

You can't memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it.

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

How often do we talk just to fill up the quiet space? How often do we waste our breath talking about nonsense?

Bryant McGill

Spirituality will take you like love; it seduces you from contemplation to completeness.

Michael Bassey Johnson

We can feel the vibration that comes from the candle flame, burning it way into our innermind, no blurry images, clear as crystal, we enter into the highest consciousness, on our journey back home, we possess the eagle's eye, the eye that can see the invisible.

Michael Bassey Johnson

If you keep on saying a single thing to yourself, you are likely to attract it to yourself, dreaming it always, then in a twinkle of an eye, it comes to you.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Anytime you meditate, some electric jerks occur in your thigh...the symbol of premonition of an unpleasant event that has happened or will take place in future.

John K. Brown

If you are religious, pray. If you are philosophical, contemplate. If you are spiritual, meditate.

Giacomo Leopardi

Seated here in contemplations lost, my thought discovers vaster space beyond, supernal silence and unfathomed peace

Michael Bassey Johnson

A good traveller is one who knows how to travel with the mind.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

Usually, when the distractions of daily life deplete our energy, the first thing we eliminate is the thing we eliminate is the thing we need the most: quiet, reflective time. Time to dream, time to contemplate what's working and what's not, so that we can make changes for the better. (January 17)

Michael Bassey Johnson

For you to make your creative work creative, you must seek creativity from the creator.

Josef Pieper

... the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.

Richard Wright

I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book.

Greil Marcus

Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.

John Mark Reynolds

What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday.

Simone De Beauvoir

My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.

Thomas Merton

True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.

Pushpa Rana

Its amazing to contemplate what human mind is capable of, incredible functionality, specialty of describing something beautifully without even experiencing called the work of imagination, carries us to a world we have never been before.

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