Quotes about Contemplation

Without silence, we will not get any closer to knowing who we are before God.

Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.

Meditate upon what you ought to be in body and soul when death overtakes you; meditate on the brevity of life, and the measureless gulf of eternity behind it and before, and upon the frailty of everything material.

It stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.

Consider the past; such great changes of political supremacies. Thou mayest foresee also the things which will be. For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of the things which take place now: accordingly to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years. For what more wilt thou see?

Everything has come into being for a purpose - a horse, say, a vine. Does this surprise you? Even the sun will say, 'I came into being for a purpose': likewise the other gods. For what purpose, then, were you created? For your pleasure? Just see whether this idea can be entertained.

Continually, and, if possible, in the case of every mental image, consider its nature, realize its emotional content, and judge it rationally.

But by all means bear this in mind, that within a very short time both thou and he will be dead; and soon not even your names will be left behind.

What death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the abstractive power of reflection resolves into their parts all the things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature;

Nothing is so productive of greatness of mind as the ability to examine systematically and truthfully each thing we encounter in life, and to see these things in such a way as to comprehend the nature of the Cosmos.

How plain does it appear that there is not another condition of life so well suited for philosophising as this in which thou now happenest to be.