#contemplation

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

#contemplation #create #does #mere #our

Gillette--The best a man can get." I stared at the screen. What happened to me? I was meant to be one of those guys, vigorous and athletic and successful and, most of all, American. I was going to walk on the moon, be a movie star or a rock got or a comedian. I was going to have an amazing life and kids with Helen and die like Chaplin a thousand years from now in my Beverly Hills mansion surrounded by my adoring family, with the grieving world media standing by. Instead, I was just another show-business mediocrity. A drunk who shat his pants and ran for help. My life had been careless and selfish. Pleasure in the moment was my only thought, my solitary motivation. I had disappointed whoever had been foolish enough to love me, and left them scarred. I was a very long way from being the best a man can get. ↗

— Craig Ferguson

#contemplation #love #realization #rehab #business

The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them. ↗

— Criss Jami

#contemplation #creativity #days #eat #expression

There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement. ↗

— Arthur Phillip

#contemplation #few #few things #more #order

So many leaves have fallen on my life. Some settled nicely to rest, but most fell, withered to bitter cold and drifted on. But, after all that, I would brave all the coldness of humanity again for the sight of a few more beautiful yellow leaves falling on Aspen, and the birds.... ↗

— E.S. Lehman

#beauty

It was a good thing, we told ourselves; the eyes grow weary with looking at new things; sleeping late, we said, has its genuine therapeutic value; we would be better for it, would be able to work more effectively. We have little doubt that all this was true, but we wish we could build as good a rationalization every time we are lazy. For in some beastly way this fine laziness has got itself a bad name. It is easy to see how it might have come into disrepute, if the result of laziness were hunger. But it rarely is. Hunger makes laziness impossible. It has even become sinful to be lazy. We wonder why. One could argue, particularly if one had a gift for laziness, that it is relaxation pregnant of activity, a sense of rest from which directed effort may arise, whereas most busy-ness is merely a kind of nervous tic. ... How can such a process have become a shame and a sin? Only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighing of oneself against the world and the world against itself. A busy man cannot find time for such balancing. We do not think a lazy man can commit murders, nor great thefts, nor lead a mob. He would be more likely to think about it and laugh. And a nation of lazy contemplative men would be incapable of fighting a war unless their very laziness were attacked. Wars are the activities of busy-ness. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#contemplation #laziness #war #business

A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in--what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#dreaming #flowers #gardens #les-miserables #thinking

The written word can make one pause and contemplate. It can make a reader sigh to dream or question a belief in considerable depth.  But all of that is nothing if those words fail to touch the heart and make one feel. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#dreams #emotion #feelings #reading #richelle

It is necessary ... for a man to go away by himself ... to sit on a rock ... and ask, 'Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going? ↗

— Carl Sandburg

#introspection #life #self-reflection #life

The happy life does not mean loving what we possess, but possessing what we love." Possession of the beloved, St. Thomas holds, takes place in an act of cognition, in seeing, in intuition, in contemplation. ↗

— Josef Pieper

#bartolome-de-medina #contemplation #happiness #st-thomas #life