Contemplation Quotes

If love is blind, then maybe a blind person that loves has a greater understanding of it.

~ Criss Jami

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.

~ Fernando Pessoa

A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?' . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time—the stuff of life.

~ Carl Sandburg

Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much.

~ Criss Jami

The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.

~ Criss Jami

Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.

~ Criss Jami

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.

~ Thomas Merton

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.

~ Ray Simpson

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

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

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

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

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

~ Amit Ray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.

~ Tahir Shah

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

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

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

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

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

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the night of thought is the light of perception.

~ Evelyn Underhill