Quotes about Contemplation

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.

Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.

Contemplative prayer is a discipline that enables our developing relationship with Jesus Christ to reach stages of growth in union with God.

We don't want reactions. We don't want first impressions. We don't want knee-jerks. We want considered feedback. Read it over. Read it twice, three times even. Sleep on it. Take your time to gather and present your thoughts—just like the person who pitched the original idea took their time to gather and present theirs.

So let your latest grand ideas cool off for a while

All alone! Whether you like it or not, alone is something you'll be quite a lot!

At first, after her conversion she thought she would have to renounce all that was secular and live totally immersed in God, but then she realized that, even in the contemplative life, you cannot sever all connection with the world, that the deeper you are drawn into God, the more you must go out of yourself to the world in order to carry the divine life into it.

They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars.

Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

And for a long while they stood side by side without speaking, each seeing the other in every line of the landscape.

In the thick of this meditation Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a stranger

The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface. [Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air]