quotations about meditation
Divinely bent to meditation;
And in no worldly suits would he be mov'd,
To draw him from his holy exercise.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Richard III
One way of meditation to make us grow great and noble is that it brings us into great company. For as a sage wished "that virtue might assume a visible form," so the mind constantly clothes grandeur with shape, looking at it not as a spread of power in the sky, but as a soul and life in some person. Therefore to meditate on high and sacred things is to bring before us often great spirits, whether historical from the past or known only to our own eye in the present, who are clothed with those virtues or whose lives are the garments of the greatest thoughts. Thus to meditate is to look often into faces which appear before us with a fixed grandeur, their features set as if by a chisel or brush into a noble expression without change. Now, to keep great company is to grow in greatness. Lowell has said that the dignity of elder masters of English writing sprang from the great books they consorted with, there being but few at hand, and those the loftiest: "they lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato," and grew to the grand manner of that grand company. Can one go to the presence of a brave man full of simplicity and not be glorified?--as Michelangelo said that when he read Homer, "he looked at himself to see if her were not twenty feet in height." And whoever lives long and often with such spirits, must not he come to see how great the greatness and what a reality the goodness which those souls so shine with?
JAMES VILA BLAKE
"Of Meditation", Essays
Sleep is the best meditation.
DALAI LAMA
People Magazine, September 10, 1979
Meditation is, if anything, a sustained instrumental path of transcendence.
KEN WILBER
The Atman Project
The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. If he loves, it is not to give himself, to blend in fecund union with another being, but to meditate on his love. His passions are mere appearances, being sterile. They are dissipated in futile imaginings, producing nothing external to themselves.
EMILE DURKHEIM
Suicide
Even when in the midst of disturbance, the stillness of the mind can offer sanctuary.
STEPHEN RICHARDS
The Ultimate Cosmic Ordering Meditation
Meditation is first quietness. We live in a great din. It is well to see (for who sees it not will have but narrow sympathies and understand little that occurs around him) that the noise is often a noble uproar, "deep calling unto deep," the clamor of wonderful machinery, of great labors, of human struggles, of heroes' voices. But storms, though grand, must sink if the sea is to show the stars.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
Meditation is not the menu; it's the meal.
VICTOR DAVICH
8 Minute Meditation
Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
Meditation has another way of ennoblement, but parallel, namely, that it lifts the mind up above ourselves.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
"Of Meditation", Essays
Meditation is the language of God. If we want to know what God's Will is in our life, if we want God to guide us, mould us and fulfil Himself in and through us, then meditation is the language that we must use.
SRI CHINMOY
Meditation: Man-Perfection in God-Satisfaction
Religious meditation, when set up as an end, not as an exercise towards an end, can issue only with all the more highly gifted minds in transcendental reverie, but with the great majority in devout torpor and pious monotony.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Natural History of Atheism