#contemplative

Composing a piece of music is very feminine. It is sensitive, emotional, contemplative. By comparison, doing housework is positively masculine. ↗

— Barbara Kolb

#composing #contemplative #doing #emotional #feminine

He looks out the window at the falling snow, then turns and takes his wife in his arms, feeling grateful to be here even as he wonders what he is going to do with his life in strictly practical terms. For years he had trained himself to do one thing, and he did it well, but he doesn't know whether he wants to keep doing it for the rest of his life, for that matter, whether anyone will let him. He is still worrying when they go to bed. Feeling his wife's head nesting in the pillow below his shoulder, he is almost certain that they will find ways to manage. They've been learning to get by with less, and they'll keep learning. It seems to him as if they're taking a course in loss lately. And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours: knowing that whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future, they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past, memory itself finally flickering and growing treacherous toward the end; knowing that even the children who may be in their future will eventually school them in the pain of growth and separation, as their own parents and mentors die off and leave them alone in the world, shivering at the dark threshold. ↗

— Jay McInerney

#life #novel #life

There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful, than that of a continual conversation with God; those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it. ↗

— Brother Lawrence

#inspirational #experience

Experience is the byproduct of agony. ↗

— Joel T. McGrath

#pain #suffering #experience

Before, I just spewed whatever it was I thought about everything. I tend to be more contemplative now. ↗

— Anne Heche

#before #contemplative #everything #i #just

He was somebody who made me think, I suppose, about the contemplative life. I've always been a city fellow, but I've often had vague thoughts about 'checking out' and perhaps going into a monastery and just seeing what it was like. ↗

— Derek Jacobi

#always #been #checking #city #contemplative

Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer. ↗

— Johannes Tauler

#according #contemplative #day #depths #each

It's these little things, they can pull you under Live your life filled with joy and wonder I always knew this altogether thunder Was lost in our little lives ↗

— R.E.M Sweetness Follows

#inspirational #song-lyrics #wonder #inspirational

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origins in the ecstasies which might have been. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe's "Berenice"

#contemplative #edgar-allan-poe #inspirational #interesting #philosophical

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. ↗

— Richard Courant

#aesthetic #analysis #basic #basic elements #construction