Quotes and Sayings about Contemplation
"It may be added, to prevent misunderstanding, that when I speak of contemplated objects in this last phrase as objects of contemplation, the act of contemplation itself is of course an enjoyment."
- Samuel Alexander
(Related: Act, Contemplation, Enjoyment, May)
"The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind."
- Diane Arbus
(Related: Action, Contemplation, Mind, World)
"The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival."
- Aristotle
(Related: Life, Power, Survival, Awareness, Contemplation, Value)
"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."
- Jean Arp
(Related: Life, Contemplation, Day, Humanity, Machines, Meditation, Silence, Will)
"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."
- Isaac Asimov
(Related: Men, Life, Contemplation, Reading)
"Science may eventually explain the world of How. The ultimate world of Why may remain for contemplation, philosophy, religion."
- Liberty Hyde Bailey
(Related: Religion, Science, Contemplation, May, Philosophy, World)
"Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience."
- Randolph Bourne
(Related: Experience, People, Contemplation)
"The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation."
- Jacob Bronowski
(Related: Action, Contemplation, World)
"Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live."
- Nicolas de Chamfort
(Related: Life, Act, Contemplation)
"Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation."
- John Jay Chapman
(Related: Contemplation, Goodness, Thinking, Victims, Wickedness)
"If we know the divine art of concentration, if we know the divine art of meditation, if we know the divine art of contemplation, easily and consciously we can unite the inner world and the outer world."
- Sri Chinmoy
(Related: Art, Contemplation, Meditation, World)
"As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after."
- Arthur Conan Doyle
(Related: Contemplation, State)
"Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth."
- Emile Durkheim
(Related: Thought, Contemplation, Sadness, World)
"What a man takes in by contemplation, that he pours out in love."
- Meister Eckhart
(Related: Love, Contemplation, Man)
"What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action."
- Meister Eckhart
(Related: Action, Contemplation, Harvest)
"Reformation ends not in contemplation, but in action."
- George Gillespie
(Related: Action, Contemplation)
"An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination."
- Eduard Hanslick
(Related: Art, Imagination, Feelings, Contemplation)
"Vice: Whatever was passion in the contemplation of man, being brought forth by his will into action."
- James Harrington
(Related: Action, Being, Contemplation, Man, Passion, Will)
"We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation."
- Alexander Herzen
(Related: Contemplation, Prayer, Spirit, World)
"Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind."
- Thomas Jefferson
(Related: Body, Mind)
"I feel like I'm stepping into a place of spiritual contemplation every time I enter a studio; it's always had a certain magic to me that has never worn off with familiarity."
- David Knopfler
(Related: Time, Contemplation, Familiarity, Magic, Spiritual)
"If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words."
- Fran Lebowitz
(Related: Nature, Actions, Contemplation, Forget, Opinion, Suicide, Words)
"Contemplation and wisdom are highest achievements and man is not totally at home with them."
- Gabriel Marcel
(Related: Home, Wisdom, Contemplation, Man)
"The wise man knows how to run his life so that contemplation is Possible."
- Gabriel Marcel
(Related: Life, Contemplation, Man)
"I think a lot of contemplation happens in bathtubs. It does for me. Nothing like a hot bath to ease the tension and think about what's going to happen next."
- Sarah McLachlan
(Related: Contemplation, Nothing, Tension)
"The great increase of our population throughout the Union will alone produce an important effect, and in no quarter will it be so sensibly felt as in those in contemplation."
- James Monroe
(Related: Contemplation, Effect, Population, Will)
"A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life."
- Lewis Mumford
(Related: Life, Beauty, Truth, Contemplation, Day, Mystery, Perfection, Poverty, Sight, Sound)
"Contemplation of life after retirement and life after death can help you deal with contemporary challenges."
- Russell M. Nelson
(Related: Death, Life, Contemplation, Help, Retirement)
"If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works."
- John Dos Passos
(Related: Contemplation, Hell, Writers)
"We want a state wise in its contemplation - just in its actions - and moderate in the reach of government into our lives."
- Sonny Perdue
(Related: Government, Actions, Contemplation, State, Want)
"Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read."
- Ross Perot
(Related: Action, Being, Contemplation, Living, Man, Worth, Writing)
"There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement."
- Arthur Phillip
(Related: Contemplation, Order)
"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."
- Edgar Allan Poe
(Related: Contemplation, Pleasure)
"The mind is exercised by the variety and multiplicity of the subject matter, while the character is moulded by the contemplation of virtue and vice."
- Quintilian
(Related: Character, Virtue, Contemplation, Mind, Multiplicity, Variety, Vice)
"Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated."
- Auguste Rodin
(Related: Art, Nature, Contemplation, Mind, Pleasure, Spirit)
"Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing."
- Dodie Smith
(Related: Contemplation, Luxury, Nothing)
"It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it."
- Lionel Trilling
(Related: Contemplation, Cruelty, Spiritual, Will)
"The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation."
- Simone Weil
(Related: Faith, Affirmation, Contemplation, Reality)
"But active programming consists of the design of new programs, rather than contemplation of old programs."
- Niklaus Wirth
(Related: Design, Contemplation, Old, Programming)