#contemplative

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. The end result is what matters. What one felt was what one experienced. One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labor. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#life #spiritual #thinking #dreams

God in Christ has taken into Himself the brokenness of the human condition. Hence, human woundedness, brokenness, death itself are transformed from dead ends to doorways into Life. In the divinizing humanity of Christ, bruises become balm. ↗

— Martin Laird

#incarnation #theosis #death

There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful, than that of a continual conversation with God; those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it. ↗

— Brother Lawrence

#inspirational #experience

Experience is the byproduct of agony. ↗

— Joel T. McGrath

#pain #suffering #experience

Quoting from Thomas Merton Dialogues With Silence The true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and, when he is answered it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God. (17) ↗

— Stephen Cope

#darkness #god #light #silence #transformation

In my personal life, I am very contemplative. ↗

— Antonio Banderas

#contemplative #i #i am #life #personal

The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live. ↗

— Nicolas Chamfort

#contemplative #less #life #live #miserable

I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can. ↗

— John Green

#books #carefully #consolations #contemplative #ever

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

— Anne Heche

#before #contemplative #everything #i #just

He was somebody who made me think, I suppose, about the contemplative life. I've always been a city fellow, but I've often had vague thoughts about 'checking out' and perhaps going into a monastery and just seeing what it was like. ↗

— Derek Jacobi

#always #been #checking #city #contemplative