Quotes about Contemplation

Look in and see him looking out. He is not always quiet, but there have been times when happiness has come to him, unasked, like the stillness on the water that holds the evening clear while it subsides - and he let go what he was not.

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

The woods is old enough to be fairly free of undergrowth. I go along slowly, watching for whatever may present itself.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

And I sat there trying to think, and failing, thinking only that whatever I would say was probably going to be a surprise to me.

My life, though, has been something (as only now at last I am able to see), but it is something that it has made of itself, not something that I have made of it. All I seem to have done is avoid wherever I could (so far) the man across the desk—for (so far) the world has afforded a little room for a few of us, lucky or blessed, to go around him. And now I wonder if I can die quickly enough and secretly enough to make the final evasion.

When we convene again to understand the world, the first speaker will again point silently out the window at the hillside in its season… and we will nod silently, and silently stand and go. Sabbaths 2000 II

you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead and I temporary and he you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this

He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.

We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his souls estate.

What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?