Contemplative Living Quotes

“When you become responsive to the solicitations of silence, you may be called to explore the invitation. This exploration is a kind of laboratory. You may sit and observe the coming and going of perceptions. You remain present to them but do not follow them. Following a thought is what maintains it. If you remain present without becoming an accomplice, agitation slows down through lack of fuel. In the absence of agitation you are taken by the resonance of stillness.”
― Jean Klein, Who Am I?: The Sacred Quest

“Perhaps the small, elderly brother mutely splitting firewood and stacking it in a buckling, corrugated-iron water tank was heard in Heaven more compellingly than the rest of us put together. Maybe there comes a time when the one who lives to pray at last steps over an invisible threshold and into a place where liturgical form, word and gesture dissolve. Where feeding scraps of stale bread to a young magpie translates into intercession that is as fervent as it is unobserved, as effective as it is inexplicable.”
― Peter Robertson, The Abbot’s Shoes: Seeking a Contemplative Life

“People whose lives are not lived on the mountain peaks of the world commonly forget that the shallows have a beauty of their own.”
― Joan Chittister, The Monastic Heart: 50 Simple Practices for a Contemplative and Fulfilling Life