Quotes about Contemplation

I can't imagine anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to music—

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall... Here is something definite, something real. thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours.

That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken.

There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and obeyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision.

It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit.

What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of the sea and the sound of the woods, had seen the house, the garden, and the waves breaking. The old nurse who turns the pages of the picture book had stopped and had said, 'Look. This is the truth.

Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger. Still an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one to do?

Here are the dead poets, still musing, still pondering, still questioning the meaning of existence.

What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years.

She stood there: she listened. She heard the names of the stars.