Pensiveness Quotes

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, - sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar…. ~ Henry David Thoreau

And though no man have anything [in Utopia], yet every man is rich. For what can be more rich than to live joyfully and merrily without all grief and pensiveness, not caring for his own living . . . ? ~ Thomas More

A part of my appreciation for the good which moments bring has come from awareness and recognition. But it has also come from a correspnding sadness which arises from their passing. When something that can never quite be reenacted comes to an end (and all moments are that way), I feel a pensiveness within. This pensiveness gives my life a quality that might be best described as bittersweet. And those moments take on double meaning and richness - because they are here now - and because they will not always be. ~ Bob Benson

If {Death} comes for you?" he said. "Would you be so sanguine then?"
She laughed and the pensiveness was gone. "No indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist. ~ Kij Johnson

Humor is the pensiveness of wit. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

In your rare embrace, sometimes I am lost nowadays. In these years, you have changed. I have changed. Every single day, we're fighting our feuds silently; inventing devious ways to hurt one another. Our gazes keep to our feet: wavering, pirouetting and crisscrossing, so as to not stumble, even inadvertently, upon each other. Our windows look out at other windows looking in at us. Mynahs no longer come by in our balconies. Branches, not of a mango tree, but of a conglomerate, surround them instead. The silhouettes of concrete buildings sometimes shine in the rain's aftermath, but remain concrete. Today, as the Ganga rises and rages all over the city, people run for their lives, but I let it wash over my soul and flood my tears.'
('Left from Dhakeshwari') ~ Kunal Sen

You appear to be a mass of contradictions," Dr Washburn said. "There's a subsurface violence almost always in control, but very much alive. There's also a pensiveness that seems painful for you, yet you rarely give vent to the anger that pain must provoke. ~ Robert Ludlum