Top 100 Quotes About Contemplation
#1. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.
John Milton
#2. ...but the truth is, the more hours I spend in contemplation, the less I know about God-and the more I realize how arrogant it is for us poor humans to squeeze the Infinite into our limited definitions.
Patry Francis
#3. When you are in doubt, wait. Fall back on the contemplation of your vision, and increase your faith and purpose. And by all means, in times of doubt and indecision, cultivate gratitude.
Wallace D. Wattles
#4. Of the twenty-four hours a day, Use six for earning and spending, six for contemplation of God, six of sleep and six for service to others.
Sathya Sai Baba
#5. The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of man.
Jacob Bronowski
#6. He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. I could have looked at him forever.
E. Lockhart
#7. Our souls must become expanded by the contemplation of Nature's grandeur, before we can fully comprehend the greatness of man.
Heinrich Heine
#8. I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.
Jane Smiley
#9. Us. The good of contemplation is contemplation - not some result that it may bring.
Alan W. Watts
#10. You can't be with God and be neutral. / True contemplation is resistance. And poetry, / gazing at clouds is resistance I found out in jail.
Ernesto Cardenal
#11. Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.
George Santayana
#12. Banish, therefore, from thy heart the distractions of earth and turn thine eyes to spiritual joys, that thou mayest learn at last to repose in the light of the contemplation of God.
Albertus Magnus
#13. Furthermore, the apostolic life does not exclude contemplation but encompasses it and profits by it to know better the eternal truths it must proclaim
Vincent De Paul
#14. Shuddha upayog (applied awareness of the Self, The Soul) means to be able to see the Soul and the Body of the other person as separate. The constant contemplation of 'I am pure Soul (Shuddhatma)' is shukladhyan (pure contemplation as the Self).
Dada Bhagwan
#15. Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.
Wayne Dyer
#16. The law of flying was not discovered by the contemplation of things staying on the ground.
Wayne Dyer
#17. Contemplation places us in a purity and radiance which is far above our understanding.
John Of Ruysbroeck
#18. Latins are predisposed to thinking about the past. Catholicism has a lot to do with it because Catholicism is a contemplation of the past, of symbols that are supposed to be eternally present.
Oscar Hijuelos
#19. Action isn't my forte. I'm an expert on contemplation and mild regret.
Robert Sheckley
#20. Self-contemplation is a curse
That makes an old confusion worse.
Theodore Roethke
#21. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.
Aldous Huxley
#22. Between women love is contemplation; caresses are meant less to appropriate the other than to recreate oneself slowly through her; separation is eliminated, there is neither fight nor victory nor defeat; each one is both subject and object
Simone De Beauvoir
#23. Nature I'll court in her sequester'd haunts,
By mountain, meadow, streamlet, grove, or cell;
Where the pois'd lark his evening ditty chants,
And health, and peace, and contemplation dwell.
Tobias Smollett
#24. Because of Christianity the West has missed many things, and one of them is meditation, the rarest flowering of a human being, because they have made it equivalent to contemplation. Contemplation is thinking. Meditation is no-thinking.
Rajneesh
#25. I suppose, all traditions sound silly when explained or discussed.
I nodded at this truth. It was a good thought, worth remembering, worthy of further contemplation. I tucked it away as a data point to be mulled over later.
Penny Reid
#26. Proprieties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent.
Edgar Allan Poe
#27. Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.
Thomas Merton
#28. The eye and soul are caressed in the contemplation of form and colour. The subtle changes of colour over a surface - transitions that are like music - are intangible in their reaction upon us. There is an immediate sensuous appeal!
John F. Carlson
#29. For a moment of intense terror she paused upon the giddy pinnacle, as if in contemplation of her own sublimity, then trembled and tottered, and
came down.
Edgar Allan Poe
#30. Feminism never harmed anybody unless it was some feminists. The danger is that the study and contemplation of "ourselves" may become so absorbing that it builds by slow degrees a high wall that shuts out the great world of thought.
Rheta Childe Dorr
#31. The act of contemplation then creates the thing created.
Isaac D'Israeli
#32. Formal education opens the world to you; contemplation and reflection open yourself to you.
Debasish Mridha
#33. COMFORT, n. A state of mind produced by contemplation of a neighbor's uneasiness.
Ambrose Bierce
#34. I think that Jean Houston has broken through to a new understanding of the sense and uses of inward-turned contemplation-a n understanding that leaves the Freudian schools of technique and theory far behind. The accent is not on the curing of disease but on the enlargement, rather, of our health.
Joseph Campbell
#35. Love is like some fresh spring, first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.
Honore De Balzac
#36. God has special confidences for each soul. Indeed, it would seem as though the deepest truths came only in moments of profound devotional silence and contemplation.
Charles Brent
#37. I don't desire to change anything in England except the weather, I am quite content with philosophical contemplation.
Oscar Wilde
#38. The mistake we make is to look for a source of comfort in ourselves: self-contemplation, instead of gazing upon God. In other words, we look for comfort precisely where comfort never can be.
Frederick William Robertson
#40. Arthur Gride, whose bleared eyes gloated only over the outward beauties, and were blind to the spirit which reigned within, evinced - a fantastic kind of warmth certainly, but not exactly that kind of warmth of feeling which the contemplation of virtue usually inspires.
Charles Dickens
#41. A life of Wisdom must be a life of contemplation and action
M. Scott Peck
#42. With passions stilled and one's nature firm, all destinies are in harmony; When the full moon of contemplation is reached you will be pure.
Wu Cheng'en
#43. Much insight into himself could have been gained from contemplation of these things, but Wintrow reined his mind away from it. Perhaps he did not want to know himself quite that well."
p. 543
Robin Hobb
#44. There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement.
Arthur Phillips
#45. Humor is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite.
Christian Morgenstern
#46. In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.
Alfred North Whitehead
#47. The saints repeated this truth time and again over the centuries; that the natural state of a human being is the continuous contemplation and memory of God. I do not mean by that a cerebral memory of God but a memory that works from within the heart.
Kyriacos C. Markides
#48. When I make my work, I am making what I hope to be something functional - a space for individual contemplation and reflection. I want my art to be useful.
Bill Viola
#49. Those who are more adapted to the active life can prepare themselves for contemplation in the practice of the active life, while those who are more adapted to the contemplative life can take upon themselves the works of the active life so as to become yet.
Thomas Aquinas
#50. Divine service, being the high contemplation of the mind, is at the same time, and pre-eminently, the peace, the sweetness and blessedness of the heart.
John Of Kronstadt
#51. There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life.
Lin Yutang
#52. So sometimes she wondered, in a distracted sort of way, where she was when she wasn't here, but mostly her needs were too sudden and pressing for any extended contemplation, and she simply fulfilled what needed to be fulfilled, did what needed to be done.
Stephen King
#53. I feel like I'm stepping into a place of spiritual contemplation every time I enter a studio; it's always had a certain magic to me that has never worn off with familiarity.
David Knopfler
#54. Virtues can be developed through study and contemplation or, as this sutra suggests, through recognizing their presence in others. In other words, we should cultivate the habit of celebrating virtues wherever we recognize them. The more we rejoice in them, the sooner they will be ours.
Jaganath Carrera
#55. Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.
Emile Durkheim
#56. The stronghold of the contemplation of Christ's glory affords the soul rest, for it will be made evident that our troubles grow on the root of an over-valuation of temporal things. The mind is its own greatest troubler.
John Owen
#57. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.
Viktor E. Frankl
#58. One does not contemplate it like a picture. The idea of contemplation disappears completely. Simply take note that it's a bottle rack, or that it's a bottle rack that has changed its destination ... It's not the visual question of the readymade that counts; it's the fact that it exists, even.
Marcel Duchamp
#59. MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.
Ambrose Bierce
#60. Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. There are five stages of meditation, each one leading gradually into the next: concentration, meditation, contemplation, illumination, and inspiration.
Benjamin Creme
#62. Contemplation is nothing else but a secret, peaceful, and loving infusion of God, which, if admitted, will set the soul on fire with the spirit of love, as I shall show in the explanation of the following verse.
San Juan De La Cruz
#63. It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.
Rachel Carson
#64. I can recommend nothing better ... than that you endeavor to infuse into your works what you learn from the contemplation of the works of others.
Joshua Reynolds
#65. Gradually, the anxiety gives way to contemplation, and I start to listen to my soul. It has been longing to speak to me, but I'm always too busy.
Paulo Coelho
#66. Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#67. The feeding of those that are hungry is a form of contemplation.
Simone Weil
#68. What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.
Meister Eckhart
#69. Wisdom's self oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, where with her best nurse Contemplation, she plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings that in the various bustle of resort were all to-ruffled, and sometimes impaired.
John Milton
#70. Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
George Santayana
#71. Magic comprises the most profound contemplation of the most secret things, their nature, power, quality, substance, and virtues, as well as the knowledge of their whole nature.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
#72. There is no wisdom for a man without harmony, and without harmony there is no contemplation. Without contemplation there cannot be peace, and without peace can there be joy?
Juan Mascaro
#73. Places grow to have meaning in your life from experience, from the process of connecting. The inevitable contemplation of commemorative tattoos follows.
Al Burian
#75. Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.
Blaise Pascal
#77. Nature in darkness groans and men are bound to sullen contemplation in the night: restless they turn on beds of sorrow; in their inmost brain feeling the crushing wheels, they rise, they write the bitter words of stern philosophy and knead the bread of knowledge with tears and groans.
William Blake
#78. Politicians are addicted to spending and revenue extraction. As with an addict, there's little pause for moral or legal contemplation.
David Malpass
#79. In democratic society each citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very petty object, which is himself.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#80. There is a sort of consolation at the contemplation of the yawning abyss, at the bottom of which lie darkness and obscurity. Edmond
Alexandre Dumas
#81. Action should be founded on contemplation, and those of us who act don't put enough time, don't give enough emphasis, to contemplation.
Robert McNamara
#82. The mind is sicker than the sick body; in contemplation of its sufferings it becomes hopeless.
[Lat., Corpore sed mens est aegro magis aegra; malique
In circumspectu stat sine fine sui.]
Ovid
#83. [S]torytelling, in ancient and modern practice, is always a contemplation of the experience of time passing. A story depends on things not standing still, on the built-in condition of impermanence.
Joan Silber
#84. I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words.
Bell Hooks
#85. mind. I was pretty much affected by the discourse we had together; and when the discourse was ended, I walked abroad alone, in a solitary place in my father's pasture, for contemplation. And as I was walking there, and looking upon the sky and clouds, there
Sereno Dwight
#86. There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity.
J.I. Packer
#87. I neglected my clients and my own business to give myself to the contemplation of the mysteries which I had once beheld, yet which I could impart to no one, and found daily more difficult to reproduce even before my own mental vision.
Edwin A. Abbott
#88. Science may eventually explain the world of How. The ultimate world of Why may remain for contemplation, philosophy, religion.
Liberty Hyde Bailey
#89. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.
Henry David Thoreau
#90. True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.
Thomas Merton
#91. Age, with shamefaced relief, has learned the solvent quality of Time. It is this quality which makes possible the contemplation of certain embarrassing heavenly reunions ...
Margaret Deland
#93. I pray the Lord to weaken today and remove tomorrow all that obstructs the soul's contemplation.
Guigo II The Carthusian
#94. To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
George Santayana
#95. Hate engenders hate. Hate spreads to nations, and from this cause we have devastating wars. In the contemplation of these wars and their origins there is something humiliating to our human race. No Hymn of Hate can ever be a paean of humanity.
Arthur Alfred Lynch
#96. Bravery is absence of contemplation and idiocy is the extinction of it.
M.F. Moonzajer
#97. In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer any question of holding an object in view; the vision is such that seeing and seen are one; object and act of vision have become identical.
Plotinus
#98. Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence, that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#99. Existence was given us for action, rather than indolent and aimless contemplation; our worth is determined by the good deeds we do, rather than by the fine emotions we feel. They greatly mistake who suppose that God cares for no other pursuit than devotion.
Elias Lyman Magoon
#100. More and more I am learning to let go of urgency and to let my soul sink deeply and refreshingly into contemplation of the joy of the Spirit.
Helen Greaves
