Contemplative Practice Quotes

The greatest help to spiritual life is meditation.

The first, the middle and the last thing to do is to pray.

In the same way that rain breaks into a house with a bad roof, desire breaks into the mind that has not been practising meditation.

That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks, studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening, and going once a day to beg for food.

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

Meditation is my soul's soundless conversation with my inner pilot.

Contemplating an object fixedly with the mind, asking myself, 'What is it?' without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for hours on end.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act. Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil.

To be spiritual means to be solid, calm, and peaceful and to be able to look deeply inside and around us.

Meditation means the mind is turned back upon itself. The mind stops all the thought-waves and the world stops. Your consciousness expands. Every time you meditate you will keep your growth.

The most important habit is solitude, quiet time. People who enter their day by taking 45 minutes or an hour for themselves - meditation, prayer, inspirational reading, taking a walk - before they go for it in the real world do best.

The more you establish quiet time and mediation as part of your daily discipline, the more you go through the rotation into mirror (dream) worlds.

I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.

Meditation is the art of living with yourself. It is nothing else than that, simply that: the art of being joyously alone. A meditator can sit joyously alone for months, for years. He does not hanker for the other, because his own inner ecstasy is so much, is so overpowering, that who bothers about the other?

And meditation is nothing but enjoying your beautiful aloneness. Celebrating yourself; that's what meditation is all about.

Learn to be more meditative, and let your creativity be secondary to your meditativeness. Then you will have a totally different state of being - that of ecstasy; and out of ecstasy, whatever is created has also some flavor of it.

There are few professing Christians, it may be feared, who strive to imitate Christ in the matter of private devotion. There is abundance of hearing, reading, talking, professing, visiting, contributing to the poor and teaching at schools. But is there, together with all this, a due proportion of private prayer? Are believing men and women sufficiently careful to be frequently alone with God?

Take time to be quiet. This is something that we don't do enough in this busy world of ours. We rush, rush, rush, and we are constantly listening to noise all around us. The human heart was meant for times of quiet, to peer deep within. It is when we do this that our hearts are set free to soar and take flight on the wings of our own dreams! Schedule some quiet "dream time" this week. No other people. No cell phone. No computer. Just you, a pad, a pen, and your thoughts.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act.

Introspection, or 'sitting in the silence,' is an unscientific way of trying to force apart the mind and senses, tied together by the life force. The contemplative mind, attempting its return to divinity, is constantly dragged back toward the senses by the life currents.

Daily meditation keeps me sane. I memorize prayers or poems that express my highest spiritual ideals, and quietly, word for word, go through the prayer first thing in the morning. Julian of Norwich or St. Francis or the compassionate Buddha. It's called passage meditation. You internalize the perennial philosophies.

It is only in alert silence that truth can be.

Cultivating quietness is a missing discipline today...the quietness needed to nurture an inner life hid in Christ.

Meditation is like the breeze that comes in when you leave the window open; but if you deliberately keep it open, deliberately invite it to come, it will never appear.

Prayer is - listening for the still small voice of God. Listening with the "ear of our hearts."