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...

To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.

The happy man needs nothing and no one. Not that he holds himself aloof, for indeed he is in harmony with everything and everyone; everything is “in him”; nothing can happen to him. The same...

Self-contemplation is a curseThat makes an old confusion worse.

Has modern society lost a measure of its spiritual awareness because we take so little time to walk? In not allowing ourselves time to slow down, to be close to the earth around us, have...

The greatest enemy of good thinking is busyness.

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible...

. . . you must not build upon foundations of prayer and contemplation alone, for, unless you strive after the virtues and practice them, you will never grow to be more than dwarfs.

Whenever I think of something but can’t think of what it was I was thinking of, I can’t stop thinking until I think I’m thinking of it again. I think I think too much.

An individual excels where the institution fails.

My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at...

If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet…maybe we could understand something.

The happy life does not mean loving what we possess, but possessing what we love.” Possession of the beloved, St. Thomas holds, takes place in an act of cognition, in seeing, in intuition, in contemplation.

Many solemn nights Blond moon, we stand and marvel…Sleeping our noons away

I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as...

In the city fields Contemplating cherry-trees…Strangers are like friends

I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because...

As the sky prepares to settle its tired, aching feetinto the night’s velvet slippersI settle, into my armchair, soaking the teabag,of my thoughts, into warm liquidy stars.

The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.

To broaden one’s prospective is to push back the swirling winds of ignorance.

It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don’t mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.

True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.

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