Contemplating Quotes - Page 27

• The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.

  Ian Mcewan

  Lying, Thinking, Ideas

  Ian McEwan (2010). “Saturday”, p.17, Random House

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• Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

  Joe Haldeman

  Book, Writing, Adultery

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• As we strive to better understand how Jesus sees us and contemplate our own attempts to live as the Redeemer would have us live, let us remember his instructing observations and their universal applications in literally all that we do: "If ye love me, keep my commandments." (John 14:15) and "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

  Cecil O. Samuelson

  Jesus, Understanding, Done

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• To crush out fanaticism and revere the infinite, such is the law. Let us not confine ourselves to falling prostrate beneath the tree of creation and contemplating its vast ramifications full of stars. We have a duty to perform, to cultivate the human soul, to defend mystery against miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and to reject the absurd; to admit nothing that is inexplicable excepting what is necessary, to purify faith and obliterate superstition from the face of religion, to remove the vermin from the garden of God.

  Victor Hugo

  Crush, Stars, Fall

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• One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation.

  Victor Hugo

  Work, Eye, Thinking

  Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

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• When I ask people to contemplate selflessness, the sometimes react as if I've asked them to put their house on the market or give away all their money. If there was a self that existed in the way we think, discovering selflessness would be like putting our house on the market. But in the Buddhist tradition, the discovery of selflessness is called "completely joyful." It's not called "the raw end of the deal," or "I'd rather go back to bed," or "This is scary and depressing."

  Sakyong Mipham

  Depressing, Buddhist, Thinking

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• I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

  Brian Eno

  Artist, Thinking, Global Warming

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• Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

  Albert Einstein

  Love, Life, God

  Albert Einstein (2015). “Bite-Size Einstein: Quotations on Just About Everything from the Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century”, p.24, St. Martin's Press

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• It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.

  William S. Burroughs

  Careers, Advice, Difficult

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• The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.

  Voltaire

  Funny, Hilarious, Silly

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• When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

  John Steinbeck

  Fall, Writing, Sick

  John Steinbeck (1980). “Travels with Charley in Search of America”, p.17, Penguin

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• In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.

  Julia Cameron

  Inspirational, Life, Pain

  Julia Cameron (2012). “The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”, p.82, Souvenir Press

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• Today, Iraq is an immediate danger to our nation. This time, we cannot wait. We cannot wait for Saddam Hussein to take a devastating action or to transfer a weapon of mass destruction to someone else who will. After September 11th, it is simply no longer an option to sit back and contemplate an enemy - one with a stated intent to harm us, a track record and the means, and just wait for him to strike in order to protect ourselves.

  Richard Armitage

  Mean, Iraq, Mass Destruction

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• He always smiles, even when contemplating nothing good.

  Henryk Sienkiewicz

  Always Smile

  Henryk Sienkiewicz (1912). “In Desert and Wilderness”, p.147, Library of Alexandria

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• Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men´s eyes, because they know -or think they know- some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

  Bram Stoker

  Eye, Men, Thinking

  Bram Stoker (2006). “Dracula - Literary Touchstone Edition”, p.173, Prestwick House Inc

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• Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt

  Immanuel Kant

  Beautiful, Pain, Sublime

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• Each moment from all sides rushes to us the call to love. We are running to contemplate its vast green field. Do you want to come with us?

  Rumi

  Running, Green Fields, Want

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• Contemplate the extent and stability of the heavens, and then at last cease to admire worthless things.

  Boethius

  Heaven, Lasts, Admire

  Boethius (1999). “The Consolation of Philosophy”, p.52, OUP Oxford

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• To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.

  T. S. Eliot

  Inspirational, Life, Beautiful

  T. S. Eliot (1986). “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England”, p.3, Harvard University Press

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• The world appears very little to a soul that contemplates the greatness of God.

  Brother Lawrence

  Greatness, Soul, World

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• The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves.

  John Piper

  Greatness, Self, Joy

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• By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Travel, Book

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.630, Wordsworth Editions

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• If you contemplate the Golden Rule, it turns out to be an injunction to live by grace rather than by what you think other people deserve.

  Deepak Chopra

  Spiritual, Thinking, People

  Deepak Chopra (2008). “The Third Jesus: How to Find Truth and Love in Today's World”, p.107, Random House

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• So we contemplate each other, and we want each other, and I give it life and warmth, and it gives me my reason for living.

  Paulo Coelho

  Giving, Want, Reason

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• Each of us has much for which to be grateful if we will but pause and contemplate our blessings.

  Thomas S. Monson

  Grateful, Blessing, Pauses

  Twitter post from Apr 14, 2016

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