Quotes about Contemplation

A spirit that is drawn to God in contemplation will soon learn the value of obedience: the hardships and anguish he has to suffer every day from the burden of his own selfishness, his clumsiness, incompetence and pride will give him a hunger to be led and advised and directed by somebody else.

I should be able to return to solitude each time as to the place I have never described to anybody, as the place which I have never brought anyone to see, as the place whose silence has mothered an interior life known to no one but God alone.

Therefore beware of the contemplative who says that theology is all straw before he has ever bothered to read any.

But in the actual experience of contemplation all other experiences are momentarily lost. They "die" to be born again on a higher level of life.

But there is nothing to prevent a layman from taking just one Psalm a day, for instance in his night prayers, and reciting it thoughtfully, pausing to meditate on the lines which have the deepest meaning for him.

Go into the desert not to escape other men but in order to find them in God.

Had I ever read the Life of St. Bernard by Dom Ailbe Luddy?—

My life is a listening, His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond. For this, my life must be silent. Hence, my silence is my salvation.

Might we consider boredom as not only necessary for our life but also as one of its greatest blessings? A gift, pure and simple, a precious chance to be alone with our thoughts and alone with God?

Anyone who listens to the world, anyone who seeks the sacred in the ordinary events of life, has "problems about how to believe.

Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others.

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result