Top 100 Contemplative Quotes
#1. I have come to understand, like Darwin had, that earthworms are not destroyers, but redeemers. They move through waste and decay in their contemplative way, sifting, turning it into something else, something that is better.
Amy Stewart
#2. We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.
Sue Monk Kidd
#3. As manuals for contemplative understanding, the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can be found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted, time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition.
Sam Harris
#4. The one who acts is always without conscience; nobody has a conscience but the contemplative person.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#5. The principles of my works ... are the extinction of expression, permanent covering and contemplative tranquillity ... My ideal is the completely dark picture, full of some overwhelming silence.
Arnulf Rainer
#6. Being here reminded him of how hard the city had been, it's unyielding surfaces, the relentless need for more and more money just to keep yourself vaguely afloat. The city was not a place for the contemplative or the slow.
Meg Wolitzer
#7. To make films, you have to have boundless energy; you have to work and play with others really, really well, and I'm really a more contemplative kind of person. I like to sit at home and think, a lot.
Janet Fitch
#8. You know, Monsieur, that, although the contemplative life is more perfect than the active life, it is not, however, more so than one which embraces at the same time contemplation and action, as does yours, by God's grace.
Vincent De Paul
#9. Certainly my films are cinematically unusual, and quite contemplative in their pacing compared to conventional films, but I think overall they are quite engaging, accessible, and even funny.
Jenni Olson
#11. In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering.
Sam Harris
#12. You're not very good at being contemplative," Milo said. "You always sound like some bad caricature of a philosopher, like those fortune cookies with 'Confucius say' or the Nietzsche guy from Mystery Men that's always saying 'when you walk on the ground, the ground walks on you.
Amanda Hocking
#13. A contemplative life has more the appearance of a life of piety than any other; but it is the divine plan to bring faith into activity and exercise.
Lord David Cecil
#14. Inspirational Psychology includes the practical application of identifying the thoughts and mistaken beliefs that cause us pain, along with a contemplative practice to discover our true nature, which is Love.
Lee L Jampolsky
#15. Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.
Johannes Tauler
#16. Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A
Kevin Kelly
#18. One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.
Sam Harris
#19. There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.
Thomas Merton
#20. In the active life all the vices are first of all to be removed by the practice of good works, so that in the contemplative life a man may, with now purified mental gaze, pass on to the contemplation of the Divine Light.
Isidore Of Seville
#21. When you are deeply contemplative, you listen more carefully and understand things which cannot be articulated.
David A. Cooper
#22. Man's activity consists in either a making or doing. Both of these aspects of the active life depend for their correction upon the contemplative life (that is, the Hero).
Ananda Coomaraswamy
#23. A lot of people do their practice. They meditate on compassion. Then they yell at people afterwards. NThat is not quite working. One of the things I try to emphasize is contemplative meditation - bringing your thought and intention into meditation.
Sakyong Mipham
#24. On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle; Authors, statesmen, thieves; so-called humanists and self-declared fascists; the adventurous and the contemplative, in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.
Andrea Dworkin
#25. Baseball endures at least in part because it is a contemplative sport that delights in nuances. Not a brazen game, eager to sell its thrills cheaply, but rather an understated affair that must be courted if its to be loved.
Kenneth Turan
#26. Life is a deep and contemplative story stuck on repeat. love, loss, self-destruction, self-discovery
Pete Wentz
#27. The contemplative man always lives alone. Regardless of who may reside in his home, his is a solitary world.
Daniel J. Rice
#28. Modern definitions of truth, such as those as pragmatism and instrumentalism, which are practical rather than contemplative, are inspired by industrialisation as opposed to aristocracy.
Bertrand Russell
#29. Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others.
Kathleen Norris
#30. This implies that all truly serious and spiritual forms of religion aspire at least implicitly to a contemplative awakening both of the individual and of the group.
Thomas Merton
#31. It is to this silence [contemplative prayer] that we all are called.
Henri Nouwen
#32. define Ignatian spirituality in a few words, you could say that it is: Finding God in all things Becoming a contemplative in action Looking at the world in an incarnational way Seeking freedom and detachment
James Martin
#33. This mystical stream [contemplative prayer] is the Western bridge to Far Eastern spirituality.
Tilden Edwards
#34. This may come as a surprise, given the nature of my job, but I am very guarded and contemplative. I'm not a naturally boisterous person.
Ed Helms
#35. How do you design it so that people can form a space of their own, and feel quiet and contemplative?
Michael Arad
#36. A life of feminine submission, of 'contemplative purity,' is a life of silence, a life that has no pen and no story, while a life of female rebellion, of 'significant action,' is a life that must be silenced, a life whose monstrous pen tells a terrible story.
Sandra M. Gilbert
#37. We were sharing a rare point in time, contemplative, and the moment was made complete by his vintage sunglasses, bringing the night indoors.
Don DeLillo
#38. The animal has its happiness in the senses, the human beings in their intellect, and the gods in spiritual contemplation. It is only to the soul that has attained to this contemplative state that the world really becomes beautiful.
Swami Vivekananda
#39. for Fr Bede, a contemplative lifestyle in which one seeks to deepen one's consciousness of God was much more important than having an articulate and theologically accurate explanation of one's spirituality.
Dion A. Forster
#40. But compared with the task of selecting a piece of French pastry held by an impatient waiter a move in chess is like reaching for a salary check in its demand on the contemplative faculties.
Robert Benchley
#41. All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone - and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment.
David Whyte
#42. My goats are not contemplative, accepting, or introspective. They are the Greek chorus of my farm, sometimes of my life. They watch me closely and remind me that I am foolish.
Jon Katz
#43. Therefore the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness
Aristotle.
#44. Fishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.
Henry David Thoreau
#45. The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.
Thomas Merton
#46. A contemplative should pay equal attention to concentration, energetic effort and equanimity, and not exclusively to one of these factors only.
Gautama Buddha
#47. To separate meditation from prayer, reading and contemplation is to falsify our picture of the monastic way of prayer. In proportion as meditation takes on a more contemplative character, we see that it is not only a means to an end, but also has something of the nature of an end.
Thomas Merton
#48. It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer.
Thomas Merton
#49. Contemplation, sadly, helps you see your woundedness! That's why most people do not stay long with contemplative prayer, because it's not very glorious. It's a continual humiliation, realizing, Oh my God, I did it again. I still don't know how to love!
Richard Rohr
#50. When studying the world's religions, there appear to be two primary paths available to those who want to practice their faith. One path is internal and contemplative in nature. The other is emotional, external, and actionable in nature. I have identified these as the paths of oneness and goodness.
Gudjon Bergmann
#51. Witty, brooding, contemplative, explosive: take your pick.
Margo Jefferson
#52. Seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, all the time, and his hand in every happening; This is what it means to be contemplative in the heart of the world. Seeing and adoring the presence of Jesus, especially in the lowly appearance of bread, and in the distressing disguise of the poor.
Mother Teresa
#53. Compassion will no longer be seen as a spiritual luxury for a contemplative few; rather it will be viewed as a social necessity for the entire human family.
Duane Elgin
#54. Contemplative traditions on the whole have historically emphasized subjective, first-person investigation of the nature and functions of consciousness, by training the mind to focus in a disciplined way on its own internal states.
Dalai Lama XIV
#55. In contemplative prayer we seek to become the person we are called to be, not by thinking of God, but by being with God. Simply to be with God is to be drawn into being the person God calls us to be
John Main
#56. Astronauts were not the impulsive daredevils so dear to the stereopticonloving public. They couldn't afford to be. The hazards of the profession required an infinite capacity for cautious, contemplative thought.
Eric Frank Russell
#57. The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation, contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#58. When the contemplative mind is a French mind, it is content, for the most part, to contemplate France. When the contemplative mind is an English mind, it is liable to be seized at any moment by an importunate desire to contemplate Morocco or Labrador.
Agnes Repplier
#59. I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.
Richard Rohr
#60. Introspection, or 'sitting in the silence,' is an unscientific way of trying to force apart the mind and senses, tied together by the life force. The contemplative mind, attempting its return to divinity, is constantly dragged back toward the senses by the life currents.
Paramahansa Yogananda
#61. I like to think of the landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet. To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its mulitplicity and endless variety, come in.
Gretel Ehrlich
#62. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.
Haruki Murakami
#63. Bassist Steve Uccello's Symmetria is filled with cool and unique sounds, textures, and musical ideas, evoking an imagined atmosphere of open spaces influenced by Ry Cooder's desert dusty roads as much as anything a bassist could conjure up. It fits a mellow, contemplative mood perfectly.
Bryan Beller
#64. To be contemplative we must become converted to the consciousness that makes us one with the universe, in tune with the cosmic voice of God.
Joan D. Chittister
#65. A person archives self-realization by engaging in deliberate contemplative acts that serve to unify of all aspects of the self. To deny part of the self, a person risks spiritual decay.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#66. I cannot imagine why my vision will have some value in the world..and yet I know it will..I think I will count because I am patient and recueilli (contemplative) in some degree.
Gwen John
#67. I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.
Alice Walker
#68. To praise the contemplative life is not to reject every other form of life, but to seek a solid foundation for every other human striving. Without
Thomas Merton
#69. The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him.
Thomas Merton
#70. We should all without shame enrol in the school of contemplative prayer.
Richard J. Foster
#71. Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.
Gilles Deleuze
#72. The Buddhist understanding of mind is primarily derived from empirical observations grounded in the phenomenology of experience, which includes the contemplative techniques of meditation.
Dalai Lama XIV
#73. From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It's a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis.
Sam Harris
#74. The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer
Thomas Merton
#75. The female heart is a world unto itself, incomprehensible to men. Yet I perceive that you have been of a mood today: pensive, contemplative, hesitant, expectant. And you have spent the better part of the day watching me as if you thought I might follow your merlin into the sky and never return.
Stephen R. Lawhead
#76. Another of the things I started to do during this time was what Buddhists normally call "meditation" or, in Christian terms, "contemplative prayer". It began to supersede deipnosophy as my favorite hobby.
Sara Maitland
#77. This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of "memory," not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing.
Richard Rohr
#78. (The story that Newton was inspired by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat "in a contemplative mood" and "was occasioned by the fall of an apple.")
Stephen Hawking
#79. the contemplative life not only does not exclude, but requires, the active life.
Peter Kreeft
#80. I should love a dear little blind rat,' said Wendy, and added in a contemplative voice: 'I sometimes wish I were blind you know, so that I needn't see my tooth water after I've spat it.
Nancy Mitford
#81. From about 5 years old on, I was very contemplative and started to become constantly filled with nostalgia for the present moment and the feeling that it's always fleeting.
Alex Ebert
#82. It's okay that I got sick, I suddenly realize. If Lyme hadn't taken me down so radically, I wouldn't have learned about stillness. I would not have discovered my enormous capacity to endure. I would have not have embraced this deeply contemplative place within my own being.
Katina Makris
#83. The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed or mounted over the fireplace in the den.
Lewis H. Lapham
#84. He poured himself a glass of whiskey. And another. And another. Not enough to get stinking drunk, just enough to make him overly contemplative.
Julia Quinn
#85. But once we become practiced at a contemplative worldview, a "thisness" way of seeing, there is nothing trivial anymore and all is grace.
Richard Rohr
#86. We become, after the arrival of the printing press in general, more attentive more attuned to contemplative ways of thinking.
Nicholas G. Carr
#87. In good writing, the contemplative and the exciting happen at the same time.
Dave Morris
#88. To Time it never seems that he is brave
To set himself against the peaks of snow
To lay them level with the running wave,
Nor is he overjoyed when they lie low,
But only grave, contemplative and grave.
Robert Frost
#89. My biggest past mistakes have been when I made decisions out of ego rather than spirit. When I acted too quickly. When I wasn't contemplative or reflective or prayerful enough, and I ended up making what I would only later see to be unwise decisions.
Marianne Williamson
#90. There's no Biblical definition of contemplative prayer
Mike Bickle
#91. One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves.
Thomas Merton
#92. I guess when we're happy, it's easier to go with the flow, and when that happiness or joy is interrupted, that's when we get contemplative and break out the guitar or pen and write about it.
Jeremy Fisher
#93. They were creating a program on contemplative prayer called Be Still. They asked me to be a part of this project that was designed to help Americans see the importance of spending time before God in stillness. I knew immediately that God wanted me to be a part of the project.
Priscilla Shirer
#94. Almost everyone who reaches a plateau where he or she is happy and comfortable says it's because of finding balance between work, relaxation, exercise, socialising and family - plus some alone time to do something contemplative, creative, or educational.
Neil Strauss
#95. Baseball is meant to be a contemplative game. They play music to draw young people to the game. If young people can't come to the game without music, then they should stay home.
W.P. Kinsella
#96. Composing a piece of music is very feminine. It is sensitive, emotional, contemplative. By comparison, doing housework is positively masculine.
Barbara Kolb
#97. The meditative state is the highest state of existence. So long as there is desire, no real happiness can come. It is only the contemplative, witness-like study of objects that brings to us real enjoyment and happiness.
Swami Vivekananda
#98. Perhaps ... these days of less sunlight are opportunities for more contemplative time, more looking deeply to see what can only be seen in the dark.
Sylvia Boorstein
#99. Obstinacy and heat in argument are surest proofs of folly. Is there anything so stubborn, obstinate, disdainful, contemplative, grave, or serious, as an ass?
Michel De Montaigne
#100. Jesus was contemplative and activist, mystic and prophet, Spirit and form, God and human, absolute and relative, Creator and creature, existing for eternity and existing in time.
Amos Smith
