Quotes about Contemplation

I always thought faith was kind of a personal thing, Dad says thoughtfully. Everyone has to figure out for themselves how much they should do things like pray or read the Bible.

Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart." LUKE 2:19

I will meditate on Your precepts and think about Your ways. I will delight in Your statutes; I will not forget Your word. Psalm 119:15—16

One of the greatest attacks of the enemy is to make you busy, to make you hurried, to make you noisy, to make you distracted, to fill the people of God and the Church of God with so much noise and activity that there is no room for prayer. There is no room for being alone with God. There is no room for silence. There is no room for meditation.

What I have experienced, and experienced repeatedly, is the silence of God. For many years, this was a distressing matter for me. I did not consider it an experience, but the absence of an experience.

It's okay to be an introvert, to seek out the quiet corners at a cocktail party, to care about quality, to have your mood be affected by your surroundings.

He looks upon sky and steppe and sees that which God has created. I look and see God Himself.

Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee.

So long, therefore, as the object of the mystic's contemplation is amenable to thought, is something which he can "know," he may be quite sure that it is not the Absolute; but only a partial image or symbol of the Absolute. To find that final Reality, he must enter into the "cloud of unknowing"--must pass beyond the plane on which the intellect can work. "When I say darkness," says the same great mystic, "I mean thereby a lack of knowing....

That dreadful consciousness of a narrow and limiting I-hood which dogs our search for freedom and full life, is done away. For a moment, at least, the independent spiritual life is achieved. The contemplative is merged in it "like a bird in the air, like a fish in the sea": loses to find and dies to live.

Prayer, then, begins by an intellectual adjustment.

All artist of some measure contemplative.