Deep Reflection Quotes

We're only really thinking when we can't think out fully what we are really thinking about!

Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.

Thinking is the hardest work we can do, and among the most important

Questioning is the piety of thought.

... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

We may listen to our inner self-and still not know which ocean we hear roaring.

I feel like, for me, reading Thomas Merton is like “Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn’t a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself”. When you're a ways into it, you're five pages in, 20 pages in, 30 pages in, it seems like one of the more oxymoronic undertakings you could attempt.

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?

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

Philosophy ... bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.

Much more is accomplished by a single word of the Our Father said, now and then, from our heart, than by the whole prayer repeated many times in haste and without attention.

Let us accept the invitation, ever-open, from the Stillness, taste its exquisite sweetness, and heed its silent instruction.

I was a great one as a kid for standing and just looking out a window for hours and hours and hours. Now the TV does that for me, except for the view changes immensely.

[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.

When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.

Thought is a strenuous art - few practice it, and then only at rare times.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Most people, I believe, when they're asked profound questions about their own persona are not really able to enunciate it, because it's a combination of so many things.

You can act truthfully or you can lie. You can reveal things about yourself or you can hide. Therefore, the audience recognizes something about themselves or they don't -- You hope they don't leave the theatre thinking that was nice...now where's the cab?'

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 philosophize means to make vivid.

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