Concentration is the creation of the instrument…

“Meditation begins now , right here . It can't begin someplace else or at some other time. To paraphrase the great Zen master Dogen,…

— Steve Hagen

“The Buddha's original teaching is essentially a matter of four points -- the Four Noble Truths: 1. Anguish is everywhere. 2. We desire permanent…

— Robert Aitken

My first meditation teacher told me that there is no such thing as a bad meditation. He was right. During the difficult meditations you…

— Ajahn Brahm

Writing is work. It takes a lot of contemplation, concentration, and out-and-out sweat. People tend to romanticize it, that somehow your work appears by…

— Wendelin Van Draanen

Through concentration we become one-pointed and through meditation we expand our consciousness into the Vast. But in contemplation we grow into the Vast itself.…

— Sri Chinmoy

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

“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

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

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

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

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

“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

“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

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

— Charles Dickens

“Inside every pause lived a contemplation”

— Eric Jerome Dickey