Contemplation Quotes - Page 2

Contemplation is purer still, yet more sophisticated. This comes from a strongly developed base of concentration—basically, constancy—through any temptation, including altered states of consciousness, that leads one to meditation (effortless engagement), from which is born an intuitive connection to that which is being focused upon (often, the nature of being in the moment, which is the default “focus”). Some people can attain this state accidentally through some combination of surprising events, which is sometimes called revelation. Fewer still can cause this to happen intentionally, mainly because you have to surprise yourself to have it occur. In any case, it requires a real sense of the value of paradox. One leaves a single position behind (such as “I like this” or “I don’t like this”) and expands in comprehension to simultaneously experience its opposite as well. From there, one rises above the two through a creative burst of intuition, and looks down on them both. What you might call transcendence, although I prefer mildly amused.

Darrell Calkins

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.

Anthony Liccione

Yesterday, she shed tears, keeping her head on my shoulders. And I think she's not going to be fine because I know she won't. Because a couple of years back, I wasn't.And when you know that you've fallen hard on a cold ground and are still lying there, what do you tell others who are taking the fall?You close your eyes. You accept to lie there a little longer. But I lie on my bed now, and it's a little too warm today.

Sanhita Baruah

Personal tranquility consists in the orderly structuring of the mind, which occurs whenever a person engages in the exquisite practice of contemplating personal experiences, harmonizing time spent with other people, reading great books, and working on self-improvement.

Kilroy J. Oldster

This would have once been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living.

Rupert Thomson

What does the anticipation feel like? The sensation of staring into the void, the awareness of an end’s impending arrival? Burning and being extinguished simultaneously?

Teo Yi Han

…one lives and analyses data within a frame, unaware that the solution is most often just outside of that frame. Never underestimate the depth of your subjectivity.

Darrell Calkins

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.

Thomas Merton

The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level of stress, he most absolutely abhors.

Criss Jami

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

Simone de Beauvoir

Universe is an empty mirror. Life is just the reflection of your deep thoughts.

Amit Ray

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.

R.N. Prasher

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

Laurence Gonzales

I’ve always marveled that geese can feel a call stirring, rise on hardy wings to engage it, and without contemplation, compass or map complete the feat. And could it be that they achieve this astounding accomplishment because far too often contemplation, compass or map rob the call by sterile analysis when we should liberate the call through expectant obedience.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside.In such a way that they have the whole world as background.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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.

Pushpa Rana

It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.

Edgar Allan Poe

Listening to music, reading literature, writing, and extended periods of personal introspection provide four prongs of the incitements available to form a conscious and subconscious designation of self. Other potential incentives that contribute to self-identity include religion and cultural events as well as painting, sculpture, dance, films, newspapers, television, Internet surfing, web sites, and online message boards.

Kilroy J. Oldster

I find it quite incredible how much peace and quiet a person actually needs in order to devote himself entirely to his thoughts.

Oddný Eir

I sat wondering: Why is there always this deep shade of melancholy over the fields arid river banks, the sky and the sunshine of our country? And I came to the conclusion that it is because with us Nature is obviously the more important thing. The sky is free, the fields limitless; and the sun merges them into one blazing whole. In the midst of this, man seems so trivial. He comes and goes, like the ferry-boat, from this shore to the other; the babbling hum of his talk, the fitful echo of his song, is heard; the slight movement of his pursuit of his own petty desires is seen in the world's market-places: but how feeble, how temporary, how tragically meaningless it all seems amidst the immense aloofness of the Universe! The contrast between the beautiful, broad, unalloyed peace of Nature—calm, passive, silent, unfathomable,—and our own everyday worries—paltry, sorrow-laden, strife-tormented, puts me beside myself as I keep staring at the hazy, distant, blue line of trees which fringe the fields across the river. Where Nature is ever hidden, and cowers under mist and cloud, snow and darkness, there man feels himself master; he regards his desires, his works, as permanent; he wants to perpetuate them, he looks towards posterity, he raises monuments, he writes biographies; he even goes the length of erecting tombstones over the dead. So busy is he that he has not time to consider how many monuments crumble, how often names are forgotten!

Rabindranath Tagore

There is eloquence in the tonguelesswind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of thereeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to somethingwithin the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathlessrapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, likethe enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one belovedsinging to you alone.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.

Jane Austen

Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity.

George Orwell

There are really two essential things in campaigning. First, you must be in good humor. If you're going to be a raffle, you are to stay home. Second, you are to make sense in your speeches. These aren't the two things you must do. Unless you're saying, if you can be in good humor when you're exhausted. – Henry Cabot Lodge

David Pietrusza

Only when there is dharmadhyan (auspicious contemplation; to not hurt anyone, to give happiness to others) in the body, then there is shukladhyan in the Self (contemplation as the Self, the Soul).

Dada Bhagwan

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

Josef Pieper

the night of thought is the light of perception.

Evelyn Underhill

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.

Ray Simpson

Happiness lies even in little tiny butterflies. You just have to cpen up your eyes and see where beauty flies to beautify your world lenghtwise.

Ana Claudia Antunes

Happiness lies even in tiny little butterflies. You just have to open up your eyes and see where beauty flies to beautify your world lenghtwise.

Ana Claudia Antunes

Happiness lies even in ltiny ittle butterflies. You just have to open up your eyes and see where beauty flies to beautify your world lenghtwise.

Ana Claudia Antunes

Soulful love, is poetry in motion. A contemplation of beauty from the deep arises and the mere struggle to express the rapture of the soul.

Angie karan

Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISFAL or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.

Roger Scruton

An introspective person seeks to attain a pure state of consciousness by merging finitude in infinity and by expressing the rapture of the soul through the contemplation and adoration of beauty. In this brief interlude of time, I surrender to becoming a cog in the roadway, an insentient time traveler, a ward of eternity, a day-tripper, a nighttime dream weaver, a blip in the cosmos, a freebase glob of energy, an imaginable disk of bundled vitality that wants for nothing.

Kilroy J. Oldster

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)

Sarah Ban Breathnach

What if you were wrong? What if everything you ever believed was a lie? What if you missed your opportunity because you didn't know your worth? What if you settled on familiar, but God was trying to give you something better? What if you decided not to go backwards, but forward? What if doing what you have never done before was the answer to everything that didn't make sense? What if the answer wasn't to be found in words, but in action? What if you found the courage to do what you really wanted to do and doing it changed your whole life?

Shannon L. Alder

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

Michael Bassey Johnson

Throughout our history human beings have conducted and practiced all kinds of rituals and activities with the motivation of obtaining peace. We have fought wars in the name of achieving peace because we are under the illusion that peace is something external, something to be obtained.

Saunsea

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

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

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.

Yoshida Kenkō

Maybe the point of life (and youth, once it was over), was to elevate yourself, through time and reflection, into something worthy of contemplation (even if you were the only one doing the contemplating).

Matthew Gallaway

Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.

Tahir Shah

True happiness is realized beyond circumstance. It is universal relationship, not centered or devoted or residing on other individual relationships we have. True happiness sees the actions of others as directly connected to who we ourselves are. It sees beyond individually separated relationships and is birthed from one great relationship with everything there is.

Saunsea

As I contemplate a relationship with God, I find that I’m afraid to ride on the coattails of the infinite. But what I fear more than that is spending my life in the coat closet.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Some of the most polished ideas are discovered through healthy, honest debate, so if you don't argue with yourself every once in a while, other people will gladly point out if, in any sense, you missed a spot.

Criss Jami

By thinking of things you could understand them.

James Joyce

It was a strange feeling going into a church I did not know for a service that I did not really believe in, but once inside I couldn't help a feeling of warmth and security. Outside there were wars and road accidents and murders, striptease clubs and battered babies and frayed tempers and unhappy marriages and people contemplating suicide and bad jokes, but once in St. Martin's there was peace. Surely people go to church not to involve themselves in the world's problems but to escape from them.

Michael Palin

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.

Jonathan Harnisch

The greatest prayers that I could ever utter come from the heart. And when I pray that way, I rarely need to open my mouth. Therefore, maybe I should think about talking less.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

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.

Anne Sexton

Remember your connection with the cosmos. Remember your connection with the infinity and that remembrance will give you the freedom.

Amit Ray

Repose, leisure, peace, belong among the elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, from unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy. And what of contemplation? Its very premise is freedom from the fetters of workaday busyness. Moreover, it itself actualizes this freedom by virtue of being intuition.

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

Josef Pieper

So, there’s this hornet’s nest. And there’s this long stick. And then there’s me. How I walk away from all of this will depend on whether I realize that some things go together and some things don’t no matter how hard you try.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Who among us has not suddenly looked into his child's face, in the midst of the toils and troubles of everyday life, and at that moment "seen" that everything which is good, is loved and lovable, loved by God! Such certainties all mean, at bottom, one and the same thing: that the world is plumb and sound; that everything comes to its appointed goal; that in spite of all appearances, underlying all things is - peace, salvation, gloria; that nothing and no one is lost; that "God holds in his hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is." Such nonrational, intuitive certainties of the divine base of all that is can be vouchsafed to our gaze even when it is turned toward the most insignificant-looking things, if only it is a gaze inspired by love. That, in the precise sense, is contemplation...Out of this kind of contemplation of the created world arise in never-ending wealth all true poetry and all real art, for it is the nature of poetry and art to be paean and praise heard above all the wails of lamentation. No one who is not capable of such contemplation can grasp poetry in a poetic fashion, that is to say, in the only meaningful fashion. The indispensability, the vital function of the arts in man's life, consists above all in this: that through them contemplation of the created world is kept alive and active.

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.

Josef Pieper

Earthly contemplation means to the Christian, we have said, this above all: that behind all that we directly encounter the Face of the incarnate Logos becomes visible... Contemplation does not ignore the "historical Gethsemane," does not ignore the mystery of evil, guilt and its bloody atonement. The happiness of contemplation is a true happiness, indeed the supreme happiness; but it is founded upon sorrow.

Josef Pieper

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Contemplation Quotes - Page 2

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