91 quotes found
“By thinking of things you could understand them.”
“I no longer looked to the future or lost hope in it. The past and the future are, from the view of the present, nothing more than a distant paradise. As one who can never achieve divinity, all I co...”
“No prince, no success filled her dreams: only time spread out before her to spend as she chose, a time of contemplation which offered her refuge.”
“Look at these cliffs! Some are abrupt and unpredictable. Some other are soft and with smooth slopes. Yet, they all have the same purpose: either to lure you and bring you down or to teach you how t...”
“... the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.”
“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.”
“My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.”
“What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday.”
“Unavoidably, the life of contemplation is an everyday life, a life of fidelity in small matters, small services rendered in the spirit of warmth and love which lightens every burden. The suns brigh...”
“It is impossible to contemplate the word without the serious intention of doing justice to it in practical behavior. It demands love for God and our neighbor, and does so with such immediacy and un...”
“True happiness is realized beyond circumstance. It is universal relationship, not centered or devoted or residing on other individual relationships we have. True happiness sees the actions of other...”
“Meditation puts the telescope to the eye, and enables us to see Jesus after a better sort than we could have seen Him if we had lived in the days of His flesh.”
“Most of us think too much of speech, which is but the shell of thought.”
“Sometimes I need a place to ask myself impossible questions.”
“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 pray 'in spirit and in truth'...”
“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 have sai...”
“If you are religious, pray. If you are philosophical, contemplate. If you are spiritual, meditate.”
“. . . 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.”
“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 called to the summit of perf...”
“An examined life, an enigmatic investigation of reality, is required in order for a person to realize a transcendent spiritual journey. A contemplative soul is bound to live life more intensely tha...”
