Contemplation Quotes

The height of devotion is reached when reverence and contemplation produce passionate worship, which in turn breaks forth in thanksgiving and praise in word and song. ~ R. Kent Hughes

Protests can sometimes, necessarily, simplify things. ~ Madam Secretary

Debbie truly had Tess's best interest at heart with the promoting of romanticized contemplation, and she hoped that such contemplation would make transparent a roses and chocolate candy theme that would ignite a passionate desire in her friend for deep intimate companionship that would make lengthy modifications until it became a candlelight connection that would light up brightly and cause a common smile to take form in the lives of two singles. But the detailed scene of Tess's grander purview on the overall picture placed her friend's intent in a corner of stagnant nothingness that had no realistic chance of ever modifying into the romantic reality that she advocated. ~ Calvin W. Allison

Look at these cliffs! Some are abrupt and unpredictable. Some other are soft and with smooth slopes. Yet, they all have the same purpose: either to lure you and bring you down or to teach you how to stand up, firmly, on their rims while contemplating the horizon. Here, you have the perfect vision of the abyss beneath. the majesty of the skies above, or the endlessness of the horizon in front; but you can't see what's behind, and that's how it should be! What's the point in contemplating something that you already know and lived? Haven't your coming here made you know the paths on which you walked? That's why, what belongs to the past should remain there. The past gives us the lessons. We do not need a heavier luggage than this! ~ Irina Serban

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

He loved the soothing hour, when the last tints of light die away; when the stars, one by one, tremble through aether, and are reflected on the dark mirror of the waters; that hour, which, of all others, inspires the mind with pensive tenderness, and often elevates it to sublime contemplation. ~ Ann Radcliffe

Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and, for this two-fold reason, they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do. ~ Aldous Huxley

Music can minister to minds diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with its sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the full bosom of all perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart. ~ William Shakespeare

You journey to Olympia to see the work of Phidias; and each of you holds it a misfortune not to have beheld these things before you die. Whereas when there is no need even to take a journey, but you are on the spot, with the works before you, have you no care to contemplate and study these?

Will you not then perceive either who you are or unto what end you were born: or for what purpose the power of contemplation has been bestowed on you?

"Well, but in life there are some things disagreeable and hard to bear."

And are there none at Olympia? Are you not scorched by the heat? Are you not cramped for room? Have you not to bathe with discomfort? Are you not drenched when it rains? Have you not to endure the clamor and shouting and such annoyances as these? Well, I suppose you set all this over against the splendour of the spectacle and bear it patiently. What then? have you not received greatness of heart, received courage, received fortitude? What care I, if I am great of heart, for aught that can come to pass? What shall cast me down or disturb me? What shall seem painful? Shall I not use the power to the end for which I received it, instead of moaning and wailing over what comes to pass? ~ Epictetus

On the whole, when the unexpected danger happens to you, you're thinking so fast, you're thinking so hard, every bit of you is alive to 'What should I do?' 'What can I do?' There isn't a lot of time for contemplation. ~ Kate Adie

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it. ~ Lionel Trilling

The mistake we make is to look for a source of comfort in ourselves: self-contemplation, instead of gazing upon God. In other words, we look for comfort precisely where comfort never can be. ~ Frederick William Robertson

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

The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality. Conversely, real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it. Objective reality is present on both sides. ~ Anonymous

Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace. ~ Hermann Hesse

Not alone to know, but to act according to thy knowledge, is thy destination,
proclaims the voice of my inmost soul. Not for indolent contemplation and study of thyself, nor for brooding over emotions of piety,
no, for action was existence given thee; thy actions, and thy actions alone, determine thy worth. ~ Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Wisdom's self oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, where with her best nurse Contemplation, she plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings that in the various bustle of resort were all to-ruffled, and sometimes impaired. ~ John Milton

The car housed a hysterical bumper sticker: Save the Planet, and I permitted a moment of contemplation to truly bask in this thought. Save the planet? What a joke. Save the planet from what? From ourselves? And save it for what? For ourselves? It was a kind of perpetual stupidity in a tug-of-war battle over trivial matters. Only imbeciles see things in black and white: liberal or conservative, yes or no, this or that. Those in power laugh at those people in their morally inverted shades of grey, basking in the labels they've created so the people are easier to control. ~ Bruce Crown

What distinguishes consciousness of self
from the world of nature is not the simple act of contemplation by which it identifies itself with the
exterior world and finds oblivion, but the desire it can feel with regard to the world. This desire reestablishes
its identity when it demonstrates that the exterior world is something apart. In its desire, the
exterior world consists of what it does not possess, but which nevertheless exists, and of what it would
like to exist but which no longer does. Consciousness of self is therefore, of necessity, desire. But in order
to exist it must be satisfied, and it can only be satisfied by the gratification of its desire. It therefore acts in
order to gratify itself and, in so doing, it denies and suppresses its means of gratification. It is the epitome
of negation. To act is to destroy in order to give birth to the spiritual reality of consciousness. But to
destroy an object unconsciously, as meat is destroyed, for example, in the act of eating, is a purely animal
activity. To consume is not yet to be conscious. Desire for consciousness must be directed toward
something other than unconscious nature. The only thing in the world that is distinct from nature is,
precisely, self-consciousness. Therefore desire must be centered upon another form of desire; selfconsciousness
must be gratified by another form of self-consciousness. In simple words, man is not
recognized - and ~ Albert Camus

...as soon as you think of yourself as teaching contemplation to others, you make another mistake. No one teaches contemplation except God, who gives it. The best you can do is write something that will serve as an occasion for someone else to realize what God wants of him. ~ Thomas Merton

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

I have written the little work that follows ... in the role of one who strives to raise his mind to the contemplation of God and one who seeks to understand what he believes. ~ Anselm Of Canterbury

The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have with them, about our motive for some action, formulated in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love us ... that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known. ~ Marcel Proust

Learn to listen to subtle cues from your spirit instead of the barrage coming from your brain. ~ David Brazzeal

True humility does not know that it is humble. If it did, it would be proud from the contemplation of so fine a virtue. ~ Martin Luther

I think a lot of contemplation happens in bathtubs. It does for me. Nothing like a hot bath to ease the tension and think about what's going to happen next. ~ Sarah McLachlan

Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time'–the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years–crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer."
...
"Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist–as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist. ~ Robert Macfarlane

To paint an image and to write a poem, is to reclaim the dignity and personal joy...it is an invitation for my creative contemplation of an opened mind...it is a storytelling venture on a blank page of paper and white canvases...it is reclaiming my life. ~ Isabella Koldras, Reclaiming My Life.

When the last leaf falls,
what will die within us? ~ Sheniz Janmohamed

In looking for my mind, I discovered that it seems to be in many different places. Sometimes it is drinking a glass of water, remembering swimming in the summer, feeling the breeze. In this contemplation I observed that the self is more elusive than I thought. ~ Sakyong Mipham

The smallest thing by the influence of eternity is made infinite and eternal. We pass through a standing continent or region of ages, that are already ebfore us, glorious and perfect while we come to them. Like men in a ship we pass forward, the shores and marks seeming to go backward, though we move and they stand still. We are not with them in our progressive motion, but prevent the swiftness of our course, and are present with them in our understandings. Like the sun we dart our rays before us, and occupy those spaces with light and contemplation which we move towards, but possess not with our bodies. And seeing all things in the light of Divine knowledge, eternally serving God, rejoice unspeakable in that service, and enjoy it all. ~ Thomas Traherne

The word zen itself is a Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese word ch'an, which, in turn, is a Chinese mispronunciation of the Sanskrit dhyana, meaning "contemplation, meditation." Contemplation, however, of what?

Let us imagine ourselves for a moment in the lecture hall where I originally presented the material for this chapter. Above, we see the many lights. Each bulb is separate from the others, and we may think of them, accordingly, as separate from each other. Regarded that way, they are so many empirical facts; and the whole universe seen that way is called in Japanese ji hokkai, "the universe of things."

But now, let us consider further. Each of those separate bulbs is a vehicle of light, and the light is not many but one. The one light, that is to say, is being displayed through all those bulbs; and we may think, therefore, either of the many bulbs or of the one light. Moreover, if this or that bulb went out, it would be replaced by another and we should again have the same light. The light, which is one, appears thus through many bulbs.

Analogously, I would be looking out from the lecture platform, seeing before me all the people of my audience, and just as each bulb seen aloft is a vehicle of light, so each of us below is a vehicle of consciousness. But the important thing about a bulb is the quality of its light. Likewise, the important thing about each of us is the quality of his consciousness. And although each may tend to ide ~ Joseph Campbell

Or can it be thought that they who heap up an useless mass of wealth, not for any use that it is to bring them, but merely to please themselves with the contemplation of it, enjoy any true pleasure in it? The delight they find is only a false shadow of joy. Those are no better whose error is somewhat different from the former, and who hide it, out of their fear of losing it; for what other name can fit the hiding it in the earth, or rather the restoring to it again, it being thus cut off from being useful, either to its owner or to the rest of mankind? And yet the owner having hid it carefully, is glad, because he thinks he is now sure of it. It if should be stole, the owner, though he might live perhaps ten years after the theft, of which he knew nothing, would find no difference between his having or losing it; for both ways it was equally useless to him. ~ Thomas More

Surely it is better to read altogether only three pages of a four-hundred-page book a thousand times more thoroughly than the normal reader who reads everything but does not read a single page thoroughly... It is better to read twelve lines of a book with the utmost intensity and thus to penetrate into them to the full, as one might say, rather than read the whole book as the normal reader does, who in the end knows the book he has read no more than an air passenger knows the landscape he overflies. ~ Thomas Bernhard

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring [making music] to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it. ~ William Shakespeare

The human brain is fascinating; we will forget a scent until we smell it again, we will erase a voice from our memory until we hear it again,and even emotions that seemed buried forever will be awakened when we return to the same place. ~ Paulo Coelho

The most potent reward for parenthood I have known has been delight in my fully grown progeny. They are friends with an extra dimension of affection. True, there is also an extra dimension of resentment on the children's part, but once offspring are in their thirties, their ability to love their parents, perhaps in contemplation of the deaths to come, expands, and, if one is fortunate, grudges recede. []p. 209] ~ Carolyn G. Heilbrun

To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law. Let us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars. We have a duty to labor over the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, to admit, as an inexplicable fact, only what is necessary, to purify belief, to remove superstitions from above religion; to clear God of caterpillars. ~ Victor Hugo

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes
a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Sacrifice of the self is the source of all humiliation, as also on the contrary is the foundation of all true exaltation. The first step will be an inward gaze - an isolating contemplation of ourselves. Whoever stops here has come only halfway. The second step must be an active outward gaze - autonomous, constant observation of the external world.
No one will ever achieve excellence as an artist who cannot depict anything other than his own experiences, his favorite objects, who cannot bring himself to study assiduously even a quite strange object, which does not interest him at all, and to depict it at leisure. An artist must be able and willing to depict everything. This is how a great artistic style is created, which rightly is so much admired in Goethe. ~ Novalis

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

Under these circumstances, if they meet with no one who understands the matter, these persons fall away, and abandon the right road; or become weak, or at least put hindrances in the way of their further advancement, because of the great efforts they make to proceed in their former way of meditation, fatiguing their natural powers beyond measure. They think that their state is the result of negligence or of sin. All their own efforts are now in vain, because God is leading them by another and a very different road, that of contemplation. Their first road was that of discursive reflection, but the second knows no imagination or reasoning. 4. It behooves those ~ San Juan De La Cruz

Seek in reading and thou shalt find in meditation; knock in prayer and it shall be opened in contemplation. ~ John Of The Cross

We want a state wise in its contemplation - just in its actions - and moderate in the reach of government into our lives. ~ Sonny Perdue

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 joy of all mysteries is the certainty which comes from their contemplation, that there are many doors yet for the soul to open on her upward and inward way. ~ A. C. Benson

The things we recognize flash right by, where once they held our attention. Only the new bears careful contemplation, and the new gets harder and harder to come by. ~ Hugh Howey

We skim over the surface thoughtlessly. But we must acknowledge that thinking well is a time-consuming process. We can't expect instant results. We have to slow down a bit, and take the time to contemplate, meditate, and even pray. It is the only route to a more meaningful and efficient existence. ~ M. Scott Peck

One can hardly imagine a more healthful employment, or one more favorable to contemplation and the observation of nature. ~ Henry David Thoreau

A wise man seeks by music to strengthen his soul: the thoughtless one uses it to stifle his fears. ~ Confucius

The highest mission of music is to serve as a link between God and Man. ~ Corinne Heline

The highest goal of music is to connect one's soul to their Divine Nature, not entertainment ~ Pythagoras

It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible. ~ Victor De Laprade

Has modern society lost a measure of its spiritual awareness because we take so little time to walk? In not allowing ourselves time to slow down, to be close to the earth around us, have we become impervious to a God who chooses to reveal Himself through His creation? ~ Amy Litzelman

But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty. ~ David Hume

Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular. ~ Thomas Merton

Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active, and fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source. ~ Thomas Merton

When pondering who I am, I write the fiction that I want directly over the facts that I hate. However, what I've discovered is that fiction is written in pencil while facts are in pen. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The soul falls into contemplation before this sanctuary, where the celebration of love is held. ~ Victor Hugo

I loaf and invite my soul. ~ Christian Wiman

You must not build upon foundations of prayer and contemplation alone, for, unless you strive after the virtues and practice them, you will never grow to be more than dwarfs. ~ Teresa Of Avila

To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience as joy, as being. [Every form of intuition and experience] die to be born again on a higher level of life. ~ Thomas Merton

The Work of Art. When I watch the audience at a concert or the crowd in the picture gallery I ask myself sometimes what exactly is their reaction towards the work of art. It is plain that often they feel deeply, but I do not see that their feeling has any effect, and if it has no effect its value is slender. Art to them is only a recreation or a refuge. It rests them from the work which they consider the justification of their existence or consoles them in their disappointment with reality. It is the glass of beer which the labourer drinks when he pauses in his toil or the peg of gin which the harlot takes to snatch a moment's oblivion from the pain of life. Art for art's sake means no more than gin for gin's sake. The dilettante who cherishes the sterile emotions which he receives from the contemplation of works of art has little reason to rate himself higher than the toper. His is the attitude of the pessimist. Life is a struggle or a weariness and in art he seeks repose or forgetfulness. The pessimist refuses reality, but the artist accepts it. The emotion caused by a work of art has value only if it has an effect on character and so results in action. Whoever is so affected is himself an artist. The artist's response to the work of art is direct and reasonable, for in him the emotion is translated into ideas which are pertinent to his own purposes, and to him ideas are but another form of action. But I do not mean that it is only painters, poets and musicians who can resp ~ W. Somerset Maugham

For the average man, driven as he is by lurid fantasies, there is almost nothing more deliciously titillating than the contemplation, from a safe distance, of evil laid out in its cause and effect. ~ Yukio Mishima

Prayer can assume very different forms, from quiet, blessed contemplation of God, in which eye meets eye in restful meditation, to deep sighs or sudden exclamations of wonder, joy, gratitude or adoration. ~ Ole Hallesby

In the martial arts, introspection begets wisdom. Always see contemplation on your actions as an opportunity to improve. ~ Mas Oyama

No greater love exists than when you sacrifice your very life for those who are your brothers and sisters by grace and by blood. God is the essence of your soul, as your soul is the essence of your body; therefore, just as the soul is more valuable than the body, so the union of the soul to God by the heavenly food of love is far more valuable than the union of the body to the soul by any earthly food in this life. Feeding your body healthy food is a good thing to do, but if you don't nourish your soul also, it will be forever hungry. Do both, then, but remember that feeding your soul is most important. Merely feeding your body with good food doesn't help you achieve salvation, but when your soul is well-fed, even when food for the body is scarce, your soul not only wins salvation but also knows the peace of God as it advances along the path of contemplation. ~ Anonymous

It struck me recently, that one should really consider the sequence of a protein molecule about to fold into a precise geometric form as a line of melody written in a canon form & so designed by Nature to fold back into itself, creating harmonic chords of interaction consistent with biological function ~ Christian B. Anfinsen

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

Human vision is endowed with the greatest Reality, since it comes to us directly from the contemplation of the Universe. ~ Robert Delaunay

It is not necessary to maintain a conversation when we are in the presence of God. We can come into His presence and rest our weary souls in quiet contemplation of Him. Our groanings, which cannot be uttered, rise to Him and tell Him better than words how dependent we are upon Him. ~ Ole Hallesby

I need you to have me. Make love to me." God bent slightly and placed his lips to Day's ear. "I want you to top me." Day froze in place. His eyes lowered in contemplation, hands resting lightly on God's waist. Top him. Suddenly a ton of feelings washed over him. He simultaneously became excited, nervous, scared, and extremely turned-on. All those emotions swirling around inside his head and heart at once. "Please. I trust you. I trust you to make it right. ~ A.E. Via

You have got me walking up and down all day under those trees, saying to me over and over again, "Solitude, solitude." And You have turned around and thrown the world in my lap. You have told me, "Leave all things and follow me," and then You have tied half of New York to my foot like a ball and chain. You have got me kneeling behind that pillar with my mind making a noise like a bank. Is that contemplation? ~ Thomas Merton

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health! ~ Henry David Thoreau

Language is the element of definition, the defining and descriptive incantation. It puts the coin between our teeth. It whistles the boat up. It shows us the city of light across the water. Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there's just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts a music in our ears. It moves us to contemplation. And what we contemplate, what we sing our hymns to and offer our prayers to, is what will reincarnate us in the natural world, and what will be our one hope for salvation in the What'sToCome. ~ Charles Wright

One jests because one wants to contemplate. ~ Plotinus

This wasn't a case of gilding the lily. If there was a lily underneath all that, it had long since been crushed to a pulp. The party stopped in its tracks as she took off her cloak, frozen in wordless contemplation of a wardrobe that made the word "gaudy" sound sweet and demure by contrast. ~ Courtney Milan

To contemplation's sober eye,
Such is the race of man;
And they that creep, and they that fly,
Shall end where they began,
Alike the busy and the gay,
But flutter through life's little day. ~ Thomas Gray

We can reach untainted experiential freedom, by living in the moment as it is - without contemplation. Here we find the possibility of freedom - of just being - living as our authentic self. We are our true nature. We are one and whole. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

We are not spectators of a closed history; we are actors in an open history, our praxis introduces the element of construction rather than knowledge as an ingredient of the world, making the world not simply an object of contemplation but something to be transformed. What we cannot imagine is a consciousness without a future and a history with an end. Thus, as long as there are men, the future will be open and there will only be a probabilistic calculation and no absolute knowledge. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Contemplation, as it has come to be understood in the Christian tradition, is a return to the paradisiacal state of union with God, which brings to fulfillment the redemptive act of Christ. It is the beginning of a level of consciousness, beyond ordinary consciousness, in which one begins to experience the reality of new life, of risen life. It is an experience of union with God and a realization of our oneness with our brothers and sisters. ~ William Shannon

The initial step for us all to come to knowledge of God is contemplation of nature. ~ Irenaeus Of Lyons

True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and though them, all the rest. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace. ~ George Santayana

In our seeking for the lost Child, our contemplation of Our Lady becomes active. The fiat was complete surrender. Advent was a folding upon the life growing in our darkness. Now the seeking is a going out from ourselves. It is a going out from our illusions, our limitations, our wishful thinking, our self-loving, and the self in our love. ~ Caryll Houselander

This work opens the eyes of the world blinded by ignorance. As the sun dispels darkness, so does Bharata by its exposition of religion, duty, action, contemplation, and so forth. As the full moon by shedding soft light helps the buds of the lotus to open, so this Purana by its exposition expands the human intellect. The lamp of history illumines the 'whole mansion of the womb of Nature.' - Vyasa ~ R.K. Narayan

A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death. ~ Rachel Kushner

Worship is adoring contemplation of God. ~ R.A. Torrey

Science may eventually explain the world of How. The ultimate world of Why may remain for contemplation, philosophy, religion. ~ Liberty Hyde Bailey

The life of contemplation implies two levels of awareness: first, awareness of the question, and, second, awareness of the answer. Though these are two distinct and enormously different levels, yet they are in fact an awareness of the same thing. The question is, itself, the answer. And we ourselves are both. But we cannot know this until we have moved into the second kind of awareness. We awaken, not to find an answer absolutely distinct from the question, but to realize that the question is its own answer. And all is summed up in one awareness - not a proposition, but an experience: "I AM". ~ Thomas Merton

For contemplation he and valour formed; / For softness she and sweet attractive grace, / He for God only, she for God in him: / His fair large front and eye sublime declared / Absolute rule. ~ John Milton

One should turn towards the main ocean of the-beautiful-in-the-world so that one may by, contemplation of this Form, bring forth in all their splendor many fair fruits of discourse and meditation in a plenteous crop of philosophy. ~ Plato

The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence. ~ Augustine Birrell

For contemplation is both the highest form of activity (since the intellect is the highest thing in us, and the objects that it apprehends are the highest things that can be known), and also it is the most continuous, because we are more capable of continuous contemplation than we are of any practical activity. ~ Aristotle.

One wishes to go on. On this great river one could glide forever-and here we discover the definition of bliss, salvation, Heaven, all the old Mediterranean dreams: a journey from wonder to wonder, drifting through eternity into ever-deeper, always changing grandeur, through beauty continually surpassing itself: the ultimate Homeric voyage. ~ Edward Abbey

Philosophers are composed of flesh and blood as well as other human creatures; and however sublimated and refined the theory of these may be, a little practical frailty is as incident to them as to other mortals. It is, indeed, in theory only, and not in practice, as we have before hinted, that consists the difference: for though such great beings think much better and more wisely, they always act exactly like other men. They know very well how to subdue all appetites and passions, and to despise both pain and pleasure; and this knowledge affords much delightful contemplation, and is easily acquired; but the practice would be vexatious and troublesome; and, therefore, the same wisdom which teaches them to know this, teaches them to avoid carrying it into execution. ~ Henry Fielding

For as in nothing is a gentleman better to be discerned from a vulgar person, so in nothing is a gentle nation (such nations have been) better to be discerned from a mob, than in this, - that their feelings are constant and just, results of due contemplation, and of equal thought. You can talk a mob into anything; its feelings may be - usually are - on a whole, generous and right; but it has no foundation for them, no hold of them; you may tease or tickle it into any, at your pleasure; it thinks by infection, for the most part, catching an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing so little that it will not roar itself wild about, when the fit is on; nothing so great but it will forget in an hour, when the fit is past. ~ John Ruskin

The one who acts is always without conscience; nobody has a conscience but the contemplative person. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There have been hours in my unhappy life, many of them, when the contemplation of death as the end of earthly sorrow - of the grave as a resting place for the tired and worn out body - has been pleasant to dwell upon. ~ Solomon Northup