#contemplation

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 was a strange feeling going into a church I did not know for a service that I did not really believe in, but once inside I couldn't help a feeling of warmth and security. Outside there were wars and road accidents and murders, striptease clubs and battered babies and frayed tempers and unhappy marriages and people contemplating suicide and bad jokes, but once in St. Martin's there was peace. Surely people go to church not to involve themselves in the world's problems but to escape from them. ↗

— Michael Palin

#contemplation #peace #problems #religion #marriage

It was one of those days when I was thinking too much, too fast. Only it was more like the thoughts had a mind of their own and going all by themselves at a hundred miles a second, and I was just sitting back, feeling the growing paranoia inside of me. ↗

— Sasha Mizaree

#contemplation #control-issues #paranoia #thoughts #anxiety

Contemplative prayer is natural, unprogrammed; it is perpetual openness to God, so that in the openness his concerns can flow in and out of our minds as he wills. ↗

— Ray Simpson

#christianity #contemplation #contemplative-prayer #god #nature

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. ↗

— Diane Arbus

#contemplation #cutting #cutting edge #edge #grasped