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...