contemplation quotes

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge – the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people’s hope.

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

I’m constantly thinking.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

Contemplation of life after retirement and life after death can help you deal with contemporary challenges.

Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.

Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

The mere thought hadn’t even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

All women have a perception much more developed than men. So all women somehow, being repressed for so many millennia, they ended up by developing this sixth sense and contemplation and love. And this is something that we have a hard time to accept as part of our society.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Obviously I faced the possibility of not returning when first I considered going. Once faced and settled there really wasn’t any good reason to refer to it.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

I am rather inclined to silence.