Contemplation Quotes - Page 23

• Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny.

  Lynn Townsend White, Jr.

  Christian, Religious, Technology

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• O admirable necessity! O powerful action! What mind can penetrate your nature? What language can express this marvel? None, to be sure. This is where human discourse turns toward the contemplation of the divine.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Powerful, Mind, Action

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• 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

  Portraits, Faces, Firsts

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• It is better to spend one day contemplating the birth and death of all things than a hundred years never contemplating beginnings and endings.

  Gautama Buddha

  Years, One Day, Birth

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• Music can minister to minds diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with its sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the full bosom of all perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.

  William Shakespeare

  Sweet, Memories, Inspiration

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• 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

  Eye, Soul, Transition

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• I have written the little work that follows . . . in the role of one who strives to raise his mind to the contemplation of God and one who seeks to understand what he believes.

  Anselm of Canterbury

  Work, Believe, Mind

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• We must not imitate the externals of nature with so much fidelity that the picture fails to evoke that wonderful teasing recurrence of emotion that marks the contemplation of a work of art.

  John F. Carlson

  Art, Emotion, Wonderful

  John F. Carlson (2013). “Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting”, p.118, Courier Corporation

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• In looking for my mind, I discovered that it seems to be in many different places. Sometimes it is drinking a glass of water, remembering swimming in the summer, feeling the breeze. In this contemplation I observed that the self is more elusive than I thought.

  Sakyong Mipham

  Summer, Drinking, Swimming

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• Music... a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads to the edge of the Infinite.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Inspiration, Speech, Kind

  Thomas Carlyle (1840). “Works”, p.78

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• Spend more time in daily reflection, contemplation and meditation. Had I done that at 20, things would have been very different in my life. But things really were as they needed to be, because I had to learn ... how important it was.

  Iyanla Vanzant

  Reflection, Meditation, Important

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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• The bud, though plucked, would not be withered, only transplanted to a fitter soil to ripen and blow beneath a brighter sun; and though I might not cherish and watch my child's unfolding intellect, he would be snatched away from all the suffering and sins of earth; and my understanding tells me this would be no great evil; but my heart shrinks from the contemplation of such a possibility, and whispers I could not bear to see him die.

  Anne Bronte

  Children, Heart, Blow

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• 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

  Truth, Forever, Verbs

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.294, Harvard University Press

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• The language of cinema as it has evolved has also excluded vast swathes of human experience. The forms we find in the process of making a film can start to redress this balance and venture into uncharted territory. This is not just about unsung identities but about the subtleties and nuances of contemplation, the drifting spaces in which the worlds of the very small and the very large collide. Camerawork is a part of that.

  Sally Potter

  Space, Balance, Identity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• If contemplation of other people's pain just increases distress, then I think we should see it in another way. If we don't center too much on ourselves, then [we] increase our courage and our determination to remedy the pain, not our distress. If we have unconditional compassion, then it increases our courage. So that's the difference, self-centered motivation versus altruistic motivation.

  Matthieu Ricard

  Determination, Pain, Motivation

  Source: www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu

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• The whole of life is a journey toward youthful old age, toward self-contemplation, love, gaiety, and, in a fundamental sense, the most gratifying time of our lives. . . . "Old age" should be a harvest time when the riches of life are reaped and enjoyed, while it continues to be a special period for self-development and expansion.

  Ashley Montagu

  Journey, Self, Harvest Time

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• There is no lasting pleasure but contemplation; all others grow flat and insipid upon frequent use; and when a man hath run through a set of vanities, in the declension of his age, he knows not what to do with himself, if he cannot think; he saunters about from one dull business to another, to wear out time; and hath no reason to value Life but because he is afraid of death.

  Gilbert Burnet

  Running, Men, Thinking

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• The mind is never right but when it is at peace within itself; the soul is in heaven even while it is in the flesh, if it be purged of its natural corruptions, and taken up with divine thoughts, and contemplations.

  Seneca the Younger

  Taken, Heaven, Soul

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• I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Men, Understanding, Suffering

  Viktor E. Frankl (2015). “Man's Search For Meaning, Gift Edition”, p.35, Beacon Press

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• The bicycles go by in twos and threes -
  There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn to-night,
  And there's the half-talk code of mysteries
  And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
  Half-past eight and there is not a spot
  Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
  That might turn out a man or woman, not
  A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.
  I have what every poet hates in spite
  Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
  Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
  Of being king and government and nation.
  A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
  Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

  Patrick Kavanagh

  Kings, Hate, Past

  Patrick Kavanagh (2000). “Selected Poems”, Penguin Classics

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• the contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation

  Albert Einstein

  World, This World, Liberation

  Albert Einstein, Stephen W. Hawking (2007). “A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion: The Essential Scientific Works of Albert Einstein”, p.340, Running Press

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• The natural historian is not a fisherman who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely; but as fishing has been styled "a contemplative man's recreation," introducing him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist's observations is not in new genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Good Luck, Men, Fishing

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.459, Simon and Schuster

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• Have a sense of piety ever on your mind, and be ever mindful that this is subject to no change, but will last you as long as life and support you in death. Elevate your soul by prayer and by contemplation without mystical enthusiasm.

  James Boswell

  Prayer, Support You, Long

  James Boswell, Isabelle de Charrière (1952). “Boswell in Holland, 1763-1764: Including His Correspondence with Belle de Zuylen (Zélide)”, New York : McGraw-Hill

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• He who studies it [Nature] has continually the exquisite pleasure of discerning or half discerning and divining laws; regularities glimmer through an appearance of confusion; analogies between phenomena of a different order suggest themselves and set the imagination in motion; the mind is haunted with the sense of a vast unity not yet discoverable or nameable.

  John Robert Seeley

  Running, Nature, Science

  "Natural Religion".

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• It is difficult to explain to children in the "overdeveloped" nations that not all children in the world have such beautiful and nourishing food. Awareness of this fact alone can help us overcome many of our own psychological pains. Eventually our contemplation can help us see how to assist those who need our help so much.

  Nhat Hanh

  Beautiful, Peace, Children

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