Deep Contemplation Quotes

I'd rather wonder than get answers I couldn't live with.

If you're not prepared to give some truly independent thought to what this world is all about, then what is the point of being alive?

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.

Wisdom happens through meditation, and bliss also happens through meditation. Both the flowers bloom on the same branch.

Strive to close the eyes of the body and open those of the soul and look into your own heart.

He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.

Sincere thought means thought of concentration (quiet awareness). The thought of a distracted mind cannot be sincere

Joy draws its nourishment from quietness and from the unfathomable.

First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.

And through meditation comes wisdom - not through studying books, not through scriptures. Through scriptures one can become knowledgeable but no wise. and knowledgeable people are sad, they are bound to be sad because all their knowledge is borrowed. There can be no song in it.

To turn away from the great questions and dilemmas of life is a tragedy, for the quest for meaning and truth makes life worth living.

I have thought about it for 50 years, and I just don’t know.

I think to the degree writers are serious, there is a greater tendency for them to write to themselves, because they're trying to compose their own thoughts. They are trying to find out what is in their minds, which is the great mystery. Finding out who you are, what is in your head, and what kind of companion you are to yourself in the course of life. I do think people have very profound lives of which they say virtually nothing.

Exhausting thought, And hiving wisdom with each studious year.

In the absence of wake-up calls, many of us never really confront the critical issues of life.

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.

He who is persistent will realize God. So try your best to make meditation a regular experience in your life.

There is no meditation without wisdom, and there is no wisdom without meditation. When a man has both meditation and wisdom, he is indeed close to nirvana.

I think the terminology I would use is 'a continuous process of reflection'. I've always thought of only two questions that have mattered to me personally. One is what is really needed in the world and the second is what's really important to me and how these two intersect. It's always been a reflective process - spiraling around these two poles.

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.

When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things....but, there are times when we must stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or in its memory. We listen, and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. The end result is what matters. What one felt was what one experienced. One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labor. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

It was not apathy or passiveness. For him, prayer was a display of the strongest possible activity.

The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I alwas identify with the roaring of the diamond wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you've seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth.