Contemplative Quotations

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

In my personal life, I am very contemplative.

The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls - women's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.

I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It's wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being.

Of all animals, he alone attains to the Contemplative Life.

Woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.

The act of contemplation then creates the thing created.

Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject.

In Radical Optimism, Beatrice Bruteau sets forth a deep and shining vision of spirituality, one that guides the reader into the contemplative life and the very root of our being. Dr. Bruteau is a philosopher of great measure whose work should be required reading for all who seek the deepest truth about themselves.

Thought is powerless, except it make something outside of itself: the thought which conquers the world is not contemplative but active.

The one who acts is always without conscience; nobody has a conscience but the contemplative person.

It is to this silence [contemplative prayer] that we all are called.

For in order that man may do well, whether in the works of the active life, or in those of the contemplative life, he needs the fellowship of friends.

Those who are more adapted to the active life can prepare themselves for contemplation in the practice of the active life, while those who are more adapted to the contemplative life can take upon themselves the works of the active life so as to become yet.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.

The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.

Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.

There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.