#contemplation

Repose, leisure, peace, belong among the elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, from unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy. And what of contemplation? Its very premise is freedom from the fetters of workaday busyness. Moreover, it itself actualizes this freedom by virtue of being intuition. ↗

— Josef Pieper

#contemplation #freedom #happiness #leisure #freedom

Contemplation does not rest until it has found the object which dazzles it. ↗

— Konrad Weiss

#love #love

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#god #loneliness #meditation #solitude #love

When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene. ↗

— Jane Austen

#nature #night #sorrow #sublime #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

#concentration #consciously #contemplation #divine #easily

But active programming consists of the design of new programs, rather than contemplation of old programs. ↗

— Niklaus Wirth

#consists #contemplation #design #new #old

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination. ↗

— Eduard Hanslick

#affects #aims #art #beautiful #contemplation

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

#contemplation #general #just #monks #our

I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words. ↗

— Bell Hooks

#created #i #life #service #style

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

#added #contemplated #contemplation #course #enjoyment