Contemplation Quotes

“Inside every pause lived a contemplation”

— Eric Jerome Dickey

“I loaf and invite my soul.”

— Christian Wiman

By turns the nine delight to sing

— Homer

Action and contemplation are...

— Bernard of Clairvaux

Let your home be you mast and not your anchor.

— Khalil Gibran

Work without contemplation is never enough.

— Douglas V. Steere

Yesterday for contemplation, today for action.

— James Burgh

Worship is adoring contemplation of God.

— R. A. Torrey

I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.

— Honore de Balzac

Contemplation is a luxury of the middle class, the very rich.

— F. Sionil Jose

Whatever we think about and question a lot becomes questionable.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Contemplation must bring forth right action in order to permit further growth.

— Robert A. Heinlein

Do not contemplate on death; it is just an incident in life; contemplate on God, who is the master of all life.

— Sathya Sai Baba

“A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.”

— Rachel Kushner

He that divines the secret of my music is freed from the unhappiness that haunts the whole world of men.

— Ludwig van Beethoven

Emotions of any kind can be evoked by melody and rhythm; therefore music has the power to form character.

— Aristotle

Books that talk about 'contemplation' often seem to have been written on Jupiter. This one is a sterling exception.

— Martin Laird

“If you keep on saying a single thing to yourself, you are likely to attract it to yourself, dreaming it always, then…

— Michael Bassey Johnson

In contemplation and reverie, one thought introduces another perpetually; and it is by similarity, or the hooking of one upon the other,…

— William Godwin

To Time it never seems that he is brave To set himself against the peaks of snow To lay them level with…

— Robert Frost

Whenever I sit with a bowl of soup before me, listening to the murmur that penetrates like the distant song of an…

— Junichiro Tanizaki

“Not having the slightest abhorrence towards any nimit (instrumental doer) is dharmadhyan (auspicious contemplation).”

— Dada Bhagwan

“Love is the synthesis of contemplation and action, the meeting-point between heaven and earth, between God and humanity.”

— Carlo Carretto

“Our society is much more interested in information than wonder, in noise rather than silence...And I feel that we need a lot…

— Fred Rogers

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the…

— William Wordsworth

There are two Italies… The one is the most sublime and lovely contemplation that can be conceived by the imagination of man;…

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Now that our sexual experience is increasingly available to us as a subject for contemplation, we have to extend our language to…

— Jane Rule

It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to…

— Edgar Allan Poe

Whenever the Christian idea of meditation is taken seriously, there are those who assume it is synonymous with the concept of meditation…

— Richard J. Foster

“Experience shows that if a sufficiently deep level--not necessarily the deepest level but one that corresponds to what the yogis call savikalpa…

— Paul Brunton

“I had learned from my own father that it was almost blasphemy to regard the function of art as merely to reproduce…

— Thomas Merton

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

— Leo Tolstoy

The greater is the circle of light, the greater is the boundary of the darkness by which it is confined. But, notwithstanding…

— Joseph Priestley

“From childhood I was compelled to concentrate attention upon myself. This caused me much suffering, but to my present view, it was…

— Anonymous

“For moderns - for us - there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time, the empty hours of contemplation when a…

— Patricia Hampl

Woe to the suicides! I believe that there can be none more miserable than they. Oh, there are some who remain proud…

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

One form of prayer moves us particularly to take up the task of evangelization and to seek the good of others: it…

— Pope Francis

“This renewed a contemplation which often had come to my thoughts in former time, when first I began to see the merciful…

— Daniel Defoe

He who prohibited the making of a graven image would never himself have made an image in the likeness of holy things…

— Clement of Alexandria

“Prayer does not blind us to the world, but it transforms our vision of the world, and makes us see it, all…

— Thomas Merton