309 Quotes About Contemplation

... the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.

Whenever the Christian idea of meditation is taken seriously, there are those who assume it is synonymous with the concept of meditation centered in Eastern religions. In reality, the two ideas stand worlds apart. Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to fill the mind. The two ideas are quite different.

Importance is not in ‘discharge’ (of karmas) that occurs; but it is in the contemplation (dhyan) within at that time in effect that is important.

Love's wide daybreak draws the inturned eyeBeyond the cramping consciousness of boneAnd self escapes itself for once to fly.

Contemplation is nothing more than one’s whole person being seized by the reality of God’s love.

We are torn loose from earthly attachments and ambitions - contemptus mundi. And we are quickened to a divine but painful concern for the world - amor mundi. He plucks the world out of our hearts, loosening the chains of the attachment. And He hurls the world into our hearts, where we and He together can carry it in infinitely tender love.

We do not see God in contemplation - we know Him by love: for his pure love and when we taste the experience of loving God for his own sake alone, we know by experience who and what he is.

It is impossible to contemplate the word without the serious intention of doing justice to it in practical behavior. It demands love for God and our neighbor, and does so with such immediacy and unmistakable urgency that it is pointless even to pause before this demand unless we are willing to respond.

What distinguishes - in both senses of that word - contemplation is rather this: it is a knowing which is inspired by love. "Without love there would be no contemplation." Contemplation is a loving attainment of awareness. It is intuition of the beloved object.