Top 100 Quotes About Contemplation
#1. It is in the contemplation of what you desire that you create what it is you want for yourself
Wayne Dyer
#3. While you have a future do not live too much in contemplation of your past: unless you are content to walk backward the mirror is a poor guide.
Ambrose Bierce
#4. Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a way of contemplation, and real contemplation is the core of social action.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#5. The birds are the saints, who fly to heaven on the wings of contemplation, who are so removed from the world that they have no business on earth. They do not labour, but by contemplation alone they already live in heaven.
Anthony Of Padua
#6. Action and contemplation are very close companions; they live together in one house on equal terms. Martha and Mary are sisters.
Bernard Of Clairvaux
#7. The contemplation of it, even at this distance of time, has taken away my breath and my grammar, and unless I subdue my emotion, my spelling will go too.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#8. If the contemplation, even of inanimate beauty, is so delightful; if it ravishes the senses, even when the fair form is foreign tous: What must be the effects of moral beauty? And what influence must it have, when it embellishes our own mind, and is the result of our own reflection and industry?
David Hume
#9. Faith may be relied upon to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation.
Aldous Huxley
#10. On the whole, when the unexpected danger happens to you, you're thinking so fast, you're thinking so hard, every bit of you is alive to 'What should I do?' 'What can I do?' There isn't a lot of time for contemplation.
Kate Adie
#11. When holy and devout religious men are at their beads, 'tis hard to draw them thence; so sweet is zealous contemplation.
William Shakespeare
#12. Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life.
John Cowper Powys
#13. The greatness of poetry comes from its struggle to express the rapture of the soul in the contemplation of beauty.
Anthony S. Maulucci
#14. Love is created and preserved by intellectual analysis, for we love only that which is unique, and it belongs to contemplation, not to action, for we would not change that which we love.
William Butler Yeats
#15. Many questing young people and stressed older people nowadays seek relaxation through meditation. They look for it in Hindu, Buddhist and other Eastern religions. They are often surprised to learn that there is such a way within the Christian tradition, a way that is known as contemplation.
Ray Simpson
#16. We have fallen on hard times of the spirit, with many of the people more concerned with fear of evil than contemplation of the good.
Clifford D. Simak
#17. The one who acts is always without conscience; nobody has a conscience but the contemplative person.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#18. The wider our contemplation of creation, the grander is our conception of God.
Cyril Of Jerusalem
#19. To arrive at the simplest truth requires years of contemplation.
Isaac Newton
#21. From the first shock of the contemplation of a face depends the principal sensation which guides me throughout the entire execution of a portrait.
Henri Matisse
#22. The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.
William Hazlitt
#23. If love is blind, then maybe a blind person that loves has a greater understanding of it.
Criss Jami
#24. Personal tranquility consists in the orderly structuring of the mind, which occurs whenever a person engages in the exquisite practice of contemplating personal experiences, harmonizing time spent with other people, reading great books, and working on self-improvement.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#25. 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
#26. It is necessary for the perfection of human society that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation.
Thomas Aquinas
#27. What the jogger's face shows is not boredom but contemplation, which Thomas Aquinas described as man's highest activity save one - contemplation plus putting the fruits of that contemplation into action.
George Sheehan
#28. Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.
Greil Marcus
#29. There is something in the ardour and ingenousness of youth, which is particularly pleasing to the contemplation of an old man, if his feelings have not been entirely corroded by the world.
Ann Radcliffe
#30. Happiness, then, is co-extensive with contemplation, and the more people contemplate, the happier they are; not incidentally, but in virtue of their contemplation, because it is in itself precious. Thus happiness is a form of contemplation.
Aristotle.
#31. The height of devotion is reached when reverence and contemplation produce passionate worship, which in turn breaks forth in thanksgiving and praise in word and song.
R. Kent Hughes
#32. What a man takes in by contemplation, that he pours out in love.
Meister Eckhart
#33. It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.
Russell Kirk
#34. I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, ininvention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.
George Bernard Shaw
#35. Music is the mediator between the life of the senses and the life of the spirit.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#36. The first great thing is to find yourself and for that you need solitude and contemplation - at least sometimes. I can tell you deliverance will not come from the rushing noisy centers of civilization. It will come from the lonely places.
Fridtjof Nansen
#37. Suddenness," he says. " You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.
Tea Obreht
#39. Miss Brinklow, however, was not yet to be sidetracked. "What do the lamas do?" she continued.
"They devote themselves, madam, to contemplation and to the pursuit of wisdom."
"But that isn't doing anything."
"Then, madam, they do nothing.
James Hilton
#40. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#41. The Britons (say historians) were naked, civilized men, learned, studious, abstruse in thought and contemplation; naked, simple, plain in their acts and manners; wiser than after ages.
William Blake
#42. The contemplation of Mont Blanc's unchanging summits for three or four days last month, the sight of that eternal snow, immaculate, sublime in its whiteness and calm, was enough to restore to my soul a serenity it had not known for a long time.
George Sand
#43. Surely again, to heal men's wounds by music's spell.
Euripides
#44. Wilderness is not a place of isolation but contemplation. Refuge. Refugees.....Wilderness is a knife that cuts through pretense and exposes fear. Even in remote country, you cannot escape your mind.
Terry Tempest Williams
#45. The initial step for us all to come to knowledge of God is contemplation of nature.
Irenaeus Of Lyons
#46. This Ariyan Eightfold Path, that is to say: Right view, right aim, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right mindfulness, right contemplation.
Gautama Buddha
#47. Some are slaves of ambition or money, but others are interested in understanding life itself. These give themselves the name of philosophers , and they value the contemplation and discovery of nature beyond all other pursuits.
Pythagoras
#48. The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from theconnection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#49. Our very contract with nature has a deep restorative power; contemplation of its magnificence imparts peace and serenity.
Pope John Paul II
#50. Acts which are essentially dishonourable must not be done; they would be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases.
Aleister Crowley
#51. The joy of all mysteries is the certainty which comes from their contemplation, that there are many doors yet for the soul to open on her upward and inward way.
A. C. Benson
#52. Love never comes just a little bit at a time, I thought, as I watched him, absorbed in contemplation of the Virgin. The previous day, the world made sense, even without love's presence. But now we needed each other in order to see the true brilliance of things.
Paulo Coelho
#53. Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring.
Thomas Merton
#54. Oh, America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all your mountains and forests are really for!
Thomas Merton
#56. 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
#57. It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible.
Victor De Laprade
#58. Birth and death are the most singular events we experience - and the contemplation of death, as of birth, should be a thing of beauty, not ignobility.
Jacob K. Javits
#59. But all categories of art, idealistic or realistic, surrealistic or constructivist (a new form of idealism) must satisfy a simple test (or they are in no sense works of art): they must persist as objects of contemplation.
Herbert Read
#60. Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof - that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.
Aldous Huxley
#61. It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.
Lionel Trilling
#62. The mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the idea?
Gustave Flaubert
#63. Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation.
John Jay Chapman
#64. Repose is the secret of all contemplation and meditation, the secret of getting in tune with that aspect of life which is the essence of all things. When one is not accustomed to take repose, one does not know what is behind one's being.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#65. In the martial arts, introspection begets wisdom. Always see contemplation on your actions as an opportunity to improve.
Mas Oyama
#66. The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#67. No person whose entire time is spent in the contemplation of limitation can demonstrate freedom from such limitation.
Ernest Holmes
#68. The great increase of our population throughout the Union will alone produce an important effect, and in no quarter will it be so sensibly felt as in those in contemplation.
James Monroe
#69. Meditation puts the telescope to the eye, and enables us to see Jesus after a better sort than we could have seen Him if we had lived in the days of His flesh.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#70. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.
Barack Obama
#71. If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet ... maybe we could understand something.
Federico Fellini
#72. Jane decided he was certainly beautiful, with brown eyes and a well-shaped nose. It is a refreshing thing for an ordinary-looking woman to look at a beautiful man occasionally and Jane gave herself up to contemplation.
Barbara Pym
#73. A contemplation of God's works, a generous concern for the good of mankind, and the unfeigned exercise of humility only, denominate men great and glorious.
Joseph Addison
#74. Between the ages of twenty and fifty, John Doe spends some twenty thousand hours chewing and swallowing food, more than eight hundred days and nights of steady eating. The mere contemplation of this fact is upsetting enough.
M.F.K. Fisher
#75. That which a man acquires by contemplation he should spend in love.
Meister Eckhart
#76. Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.
Tahir Shah
#77. There are three starting points of contemplation about God; three trails that lead to Him. The first is the way of sensing the presence of God in the world, in things;9 the second is the way of sensing His presence in the Bible; the third is the way of sensing His presence in sacred deeds.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#78. Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blessed, beneath thy contemplation sink heart and voice oppressed.
John Mason Neale
#79. Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.
Auguste Rodin
#80. A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.
Rachel Kushner
#81. Self-contemplation is infallibly the symptom of disease.
Thomas Carlyle
#82. Probably the undertaker thinks less of death than almost any other man. He is so accustomed to it that his mind must involuntarily turn from its horror to a contemplation of how much he makes out of the burial.
Clarence Darrow
#83. Love is the synthesis of contemplation and action, the meeting-point between heaven and earth, between God and humanity.
Carlo Carretto
#84. Someday, I will be brave enough to say these things to you in person. For now, I remain in happy, quiet contemplation over you and can say tonight that I just might love you. Or could someday.
Erin McCahan
#85. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.
Nicholas Carr
#86. It is a mortifying truth, and ought to teach the wisest of us humility, that many of the most valuable discoveries have been the result of chance rather than of contemplation, and of accident rather than of design.
Charles Caleb Colton
#87. Contemplation is to knowledge what digestion is to food - the way to get life out of it
Tryon Edwards
#88. To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#89. I pray you bear me henceforth from the noise and rumour of the field, where I may think the remnant of my thoughts in peace, and part of this body and my soul with contemplation and devout desires.
William Shakespeare
#90. In this way, if you continue all the time in the way we have described from the beginning, it will become as easy and clear for you to remain in contemplation in your inward and recollected state, as to live in the natural state.
Albertus Magnus
#91. Human vision is endowed with the greatest Reality, since it comes to us directly from the contemplation of the Universe.
Robert Delaunay
#92. Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.
Nicolas Chamfort
#93. My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place [cell 54 of Cairo Central Prison] taught me that he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never, therefore, make any progress.
Anwar Sadat
#94. The mandalas were meant to be objects of contemplation, aids to meditation, their proportions magically balanced to purify and calm the mind. To stare at a mandala was to experience, if only briefly, the nothingness that is at the heart of enlightenment.
Douglas Preston
#95. Recitation of the Qur'an without contemplation and thought is futile.
Ali Ibn Abi Talib
#96. A pipe is the fountain of contemplation, the source of pleasure, the companion of the wise; and the man who smokes, thinks like a philosopher and acts like a Samaritan.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#97. I pity those who make much ado about the transitory nature of all things and are lost in the contemplation of earthly vanity: are we not here to make the transitory permanent? This we can do only if we know how to value both.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#98. That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
Edgar Allan Poe
#100. Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.
Salman Rushdie
