William Shakespeare - Edgar Allan Poe - Chamfort - Sri Sathya Sai Baba - Percy Bysshe Shelley - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Friedrich Nietzsche - Leonardo da Vinci - Salman Rushdie - Jacob Bronowski - William Butler Yeats -
Who doth molest my contemplation? William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus V ii ix, Titus to visitor
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful. Edgar Allan Poe
cf.
Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live. Chamfort
Be silent yourself. That will induce silence in others. Do not fall into the habit of shouting, talking long and loud. Reduce contacts to a minimum. Carry with you an atmosphere of quiet contemplation, wherever you happen to be. The less you talk, the more will become your mental power. With the increase in your mental capacity, there will be increase in your power of discrimination too. Consequently, you will give up individual discrimination. Because of this, you will begin to consider the good of the world at large rather than your own individual welfare. You must cultivate such broad feeling from this young age itself. Sri Sathya Sai Baba
There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. Percy Bysshe Shelley
The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable painting entitled The Contemplator: it depicts a forest in winter, and in the forest, standing all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude, a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan and bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is ‘contemplating’ something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything. It’s true that he would come to himself at once, and yet, if he were asked what he had been thinking about while standing there, he would most likely not remember, but would most likely keep hidden away in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it – why and what for, he does not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both.
There are a good many ‘contemplatives’ among our peasants. And Smerdyakov was probably one of them. And he was probably greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly knowing why. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The senses are of the earth; the reason stands apart from them in contemplation. Leonardo da Vinci
Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation. Salman Rushdie
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. Jacob Bronowski
Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live. William Butler Yeats