Contemplation Quotes - Page 25

• [To Aquinas] the senses are what we have in common with dumb animals. ... Our better part [is] the mind ... and [its] intellectual contemplation.

  Anthony John Patrick Kenny

  Animal, Dumb, Intellectual

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• You cannot grow in the integrative dance of action and contemplation without a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain a certain degree of anxiety, and a willingness to not know-and not even need to know. This ever widens and deepens your perspective. This is how you allow and encounter Mystery and move into the contemplative zone.

  Richard Rohr

  Strong, Moving, Perspective

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• 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

  Country, Cells, Mountain

  Tobias Smollett (1806). “The Miscellaneous Works of Tobias Smollett, M. D.”, p.512

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• Your mind makes you dance like a monkey all the time... Now you have to become stronger; you have to make the mind dance. Make it dance on the stage of mantra. For that, mediate and repeat mantra.

  Swami Muktananda

  Mind, Stronger, Monkeys

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• COMFORT, n. A state of mind produced by contemplation of a neighbor's uneasiness.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Mind, Comfort, Neighbor

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “The Devil's Dictionary: Complete & Unabridged”, p.42, Courier Corporation

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• 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

  Thinking, Meditation, West

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• I neglect God and his angles for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.

  John Donne

  Doors, Noise, Whining

  'LXXX Sermons' (1640) 12 December 1626 'At the Funeral of Sir William Cokayne'

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• Humor may be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.

  Stephen Leacock

  Humor, Expression, May

  Stephen Leacock (2012). “Feast of Stephen”, p.28, McClelland & Stewart

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• 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

  Cells, Progress, Fabric

  Anwar Sadat (1978). “In Search of Identity: An Autobiography”, New York : Harper & Row

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• There are times when I, without willing it, mount to the height of contemplation; with my will I am drawn down from it because of the limitations of human nature and [find] safety in abasement. I know many things that are unknown to most men, yet I am more ignorant than all others. I rejoice because Christ, 'whom I have believed' (II Tim. 1:12), has bestowed on me an eternal and unshakable kingdom, yet I constantly weep as one who is unworthy of that which is above, and I cease not.

  Symeon the New Theologian

  Christian, Men, Safety

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• 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

  Doors, Joy, Soul

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• A mind which has once imbibed a taste for scientific inquiry, and has learnt the habit of applying its principles readily to the cases which occur, has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations.

  John Herschel

  Science, Mind, Enquiry

  "A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy". Book by John Herschel, 1830.

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• When Newton saw an apple fall, he found In that slight startle from his contemplation- 'Tis said (for I'll not answer above ground For any sage's creed or calculation)- A mode of proving that the earth turn'd round In a most natural whirl, called 'gravitation'; And this is the sole mortal who could grapple, Since Adam, with a fall, or with an apple.

  Lord Byron

  Fall, Science, Apples

  George Gordon Byron, “Don Juan: Canto The Tenth”

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• . . .nature is still predominant, and there are those who regret that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away: for those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them the consequent associations are of God the creator-they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.

  Thomas Cole

  Nature, Regret, Men

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• We have within us the power to uplift ourselves. This power is our own awareness.

  Shankarananda

  Uplifting, Awareness

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• Sounds are the echo of the "Harmony of the Spheres" which man took into himself when he came down from the divine-spiritual world into the physical world.

  Rudolf Steiner

  Spiritual, Inspiration, Men

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• It's just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am - no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views.

  Peter York

  Nice, Block, Writing

  "Writers' rooms: Peter York" by Peter York, www.theguardian.com. April 10, 2009.

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• ...the tragedy of consumerism: one acquires more and more things without taking the time to ever see and know them, and thus one never truly enjoys them. One has without truly having. The consumer is right-there is pleasure to be had in good things, a sacred and almost unspeakable pleasure, but the consumer wrongly thinks that one finds this pleasure by having more and more possessions instead of possessing them more truly through grateful contemplation. And here we are, living in an economy that perpetuates this tragedy.

  Brian D. McLaren

  Grateful, Thinking, Tragedy

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• No generation is interested in art in quite the same way as any other; each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art.

  T. S. Eliot

  Appreciation, Art, Generations

  T. S. Eliot (1986). “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England”, p.101, Harvard University Press

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• Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of themanly contemplation of the whole.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Science, Clouds, Sight

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.66, Harvard University Press

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• Happiness is not an end - it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence. The Omnipotent Himself could never be supposed by any, save those who out of their own human selfishness construct the attributes of Divinity, to be absorbed throughout eternity in the contemplation of His own ineffable bliss, were it not identical with His ineffable goodness and love.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Mean, Selfishness, And Love

  "A Woman's Thoughts About Women" by Dinah Maria Murlock Craik, (Ch. 10), 1858.

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• The study of the properties of numbers, Plato tells us, habituates the mind to the contemplation of pure truth, and raises us above the material universe. He would have his disciples apply themselves to this study, not that they may be able to buy or sell, not that they may qualify themselves to be shopkeepers or travelling merchants, but that they may learn to withdraw their minds from the ever-shifting spectacle of this visible and tangible world, and to fix them on the immutable essences of things.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Plato, Essence, Numbers

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• Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion,not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  God, Country, Past

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.60, Harvard University Press

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• Woman ... is the divine object, violated, endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only joy, achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in contemplation of herself.

  Anne Desclos

  Women, Lying, Joy

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• One can hardly imagine a more healthful employment, or one more favorable to contemplation and the observation of nature.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Employment, Imagine, Observation

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.148, Xist Publishing

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