Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act…

“Inside every pause lived a contemplation”

— Eric Jerome Dickey

... Arthur Gride, whose bleared eyes gloated only over the outward beauties, and were blind to the spirit which reigned within, evinced - a…

— Charles Dickens

“Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude…

— Thomas Merton

“The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be…

— Richard Russo

Poetical taste is the only magician whose wand is not broken. No hand, except its own, can dissolve the fabric of beauty in which…

— Robert Aris Willmott

Catholicity seized on man... and the mystics, transcending all, taught him to ascend on high with the wings of contemplation the Ladder of Jacob…

— Juan Donoso Cortes

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a…

— Thomas Merton

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…

— Ashley Montagu

“Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary…

— Leo Tolstoy

Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas…

— Niccolo Machiavelli

We must not imitate the externals of nature with so much fidelity that the picture fails to evoke that wonderful teasing recurrence of emotion…

— John F. Carlson

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb.…

— Susan Sontag

I think the church should strive to give parishioners good music. Music is as necessary for worship as a building with a beautiful altar,…

— Dave Brubeck

My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place [cell 54 of Cairo Central Prison] taught me that he who cannot change…

— Anwar Sadat

You cannot grow in the integrative dance of action and contemplation without a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain…

— Richard Rohr