Quotes about Contemplation

He who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.

I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.

I pray daily, and I pray in all kinds of places. I mean, I pray in bed, I pray in the Oval Office. I pray a lot. And just different as the spirit moves me. And faith is an integral part of my life.

There are as many ways to pray as there are moments in life.

Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.

Virtue could see to do what virtue would by her own radiant light, though sun and moon were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's self oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, where, with her best nurse contemplation, she plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings.

Others apart sat on a hill retir'd,In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wand'ring mazes lost.

Come, pensive nun, devout and pure, sober steadfast, and demure, all in a robe of darkest grain, flowing with majestic train.

Solitude sometimes is best society.

May the cheering contemplation of the glorious hope set before us—support and animate us to improve our short interval on earth, and fill us with a holy ambition of shining as lights in this evil world, to the praise and glory of His grace—who has called us out of darkness, into His glorious light!

Seek in reading and thou shalt find in meditation; knock in prayer and it shall be opened in contemplation.

We can say that true gratitude does not give rise to the debtor's ethic because it gives rise to faith in future grace. With true gratitude there is such a delight in the worth of God's past grace, that we are driven on to experience more and more of it in the future...it is done by transforming gratitude into faith as it turns from contemplating the pleasures of past grace and starts contemplating the promises of the future.