profound contemplation Quotes

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

Tragedy is always a mistake; and the loneliness of the deepest thinker, the widest lover, ceases to be pathetic to us so soon as the sun is high enough above the mountains.

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

I think this is one of those issues where the deeper you dig, the murkier it gets - and everyone who has spent a lot of time thinking about these issues.

If you study life deeply, its profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness.

I think there's an appetite for seriousness. Seriousness is voluptuous, and very few people have allowed themselves the luxury of it.

The ground of all great thoughts is sadness.

Thought is the strongest thing we have. Work done by true and profound thought - that is a real force.

One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom -such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it -those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.

There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.

If you look very intensely and slowly things will happen that you never dreamed of before.

A very sea of thought; neither calm nor clear, if you will, yet wherein the toughest pearl-diver may dive to his utmost depth, and return not only with sea-wreck but with true orients.

The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.

Yet sometimes, when the secret cup Of still and serious thought went round, It seemed as if he drank it up, He felt with spirit so profound.

You're not very good at being contemplative," Milo said. "You always sound like some bad caricature of a philosopher, like those fortune cookies with 'Confucius say' or the Nietzsche guy from Mystery Men that's always saying 'when you walk on the ground, the ground walks on you.