I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark—the perfect time for creativity.

Words, with their multiple meanings and nuances are like trees and oral communication like a forest. Trees are good for hiding, forest for losing the path. When one is trying to contemplate the horizon of...

Sometimes I need a place to ask myself impossible questions.

The ultimate meaning of the active life is to make possible the happiness of contemplation.

It is necessary … for a man to go away by himself … to sit on a rock … and ask, ‘Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?

This would have once been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living.

Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.

The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level...

Anytime you meditate, some electric jerks occur in your thigh…the symbol of premonition of an unpleasant event that has happened or will take place in future.

The poor young man must work for his bread; he eats; when he has eaten, he has nothing left but reverie. He enters God’s theater free; he sees the sky, space, the stars, the flowers,...

Prayer does not blind us to the world, but it transforms our vision of the world, and makes us see it, all men, and all the history of mankind, in the light of God. To...

Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.

Earthly contemplation means to the Christian, we have said, this above all: that behind all that we directly encounter the Face of the incarnate Logos becomes visible… Contemplation does not ignore the “historical Gethsemane,” does...

Wind is on fire” – beautiful words. What causes the fire, what enhances it, and what finally extinguishes it by itself or by bringing in rainclouds, gets identified with it. Do breath and life have...

In the sweet territory of silence we touch the mystery. It’s the place of reflection and contemplation, and it’s the place where we can connect with the deep knowing, to the deep wisdom way.

If you are religious, pray. If you are philosophical, contemplate. If you are spiritual, meditate.

Mansions were forming like jewels in my bloodstream.

Perhaps a sense of possessing needs to come before a sense of genuine sharing. Many people who give mechanically or refuse to give and share in their marriages and families may never have experience what...

How often do we talk just to fill up the quiet space? How often do we waste our breath talking about nonsense?

Rarely if ever, moments come that are so defining in our lives. The years are glutted with benign matters which impact us more deeply than we could have ever imagined in our youth.

A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in–what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.

There is a ‘movement’ of meditation, expressing the basic ‘paschal’ rhythm of the Christian life, the passage from death to life in Christ. Sometimes prayer, meditation and contemplation are ‘death’ – a kind of descent...

He may really have been enjoying an embryonic composition of his own stimulated by mere hints in the book.

You can’t memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning...

Repose, leisure, peace, belong among the elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, from unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy. And what of contemplation?...

There’s a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

Concentration is the creation of the instrument; meditation is the right use of it; contemplation transcends it.

No reprimand in the mirrorSlow walk to LiberiaSlow dance across the SaharaSlow unraveling of gray matter

The written word can make one pause and contemplate. It can make a reader sigh to dream or question a belief in considerable depth. But all of that is nothing if those words fail to...

A severed hand Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history… for contemplation or in fact… Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic...

Seated here in contemplations lost, my thought discovers vaster space beyond, supernal silence and unfathomed peace

For you to make your creative work creative, you must seek creativity from the creator.

Of the twenty-four hours a day,Use six for earning and spending, six for contemplation of God, six of sleep and six for service to others.

Whether you teach or live in the cloister or nurse the sick, whether you are in religion or out of it, married or single, no matter who you are or what you are, you are...

One can talk good and shower down roses, but it’s the receiver that has to walk through the thorns, and all its false expectations.

He captures memories because if he forgets them, it’s as though they didn’t happen.

Who among us has not suddenly looked into his child’s face, in the midst of the toils and troubles of everyday life, and at that moment “seen” that everything which is good, is loved and...

If you cannot recollect yourself continuously, do so once a day at least, in the morning or in the evening. In the morning make a resolution and in the evening examine yourself on what you...

The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence.

Men believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe learned most of his practical knowledge – how...

Anybody desirous of success should spend some time in introspection and contemplation.

Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.

Those ‘back burner’ thoughts, the ones the brain isn’t quite sure about yet, may cook the slowest yet they often manage to be the tastiest when they come out.

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.The usual way of looking at...

Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation...

Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections...

The contemplation of consciousness—which is the contemplation of no-thing whatsoever—is endlessly fascinating. It’s like staring at a candle in a dark night—you find yourself mesmerized by something that is unchanging yet infinitely compelling. You feel...

Life isn’t memorable enough to remember everything. It’s not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes.

The common element in all the special forms of contemplation is the loving, yearning, affirming bent toward that happiness which is the same as God Himself, and which is the aim and purpose of all...

There is eloquence in the tonguelesswind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of thereeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to somethingwithin the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance...