Women, indeed, are naturally predisposed to these contemplative studies.
Throughout the ages women have occupied themselves successfully with Astronomy, not merely in its contemplative and descriptive, but also in its mathematical aspects.
For this reason, persons of studious and contemplative natures often entertain themselves with the history of past ages, or raise schemes and conjectures upon futurity.
In what manner then, says Syrianus, do ideas subsist according to the contemplative lovers of truth?
But six years later he defines these "vast contemplative ends" in his famous letter to Burghley, asking for preferment which will enable him to prosecute his grand scheme and to employ other minds in aid of it.
In the calm retreat of his Buddhist cloister the contemplative tastes of the royal scholar found fresh entertainment, his intellectual aspirations a new incitement.
The grounds were planted with trees and shrubs, and the walks gravelled, thus inviting the contemplative recluse to tranquil, soothing strolls.
As the friendship between the cousins ripened, his Majesty considered that it would be well for him to have the contemplative student, prudent adviser, and able reasoner nearer to him.
For once we take a contemplative attitude towards life, foregoing praise and blame, there is no spectacle equal to it for tragic pity and fear and admiration.
They are the universal aesthetic values which may result from any free expression of life--the contemplative reliving of its joys, or the mastery of its pains through the courageous facing of them in reflection.
The contemplativespirit of art is perhaps more important than the constructive in its application to life.
But I expect that when they've learnt how to combine the contemplative with the active side of their religious life they will be splendid.
But I gather that you claim to be contemplative here.
But I have no vocation for the contemplative life.
I told the Reverend Father that I hoped to be ordained as a secular priest and that I did not imagine I had any vocation for the contemplative life.
The Reverend Mother wanted me to leave the community and enter a contemplative order.
You may say that the Order of St. George is an Order devoted to active work among soldiers, and that we are not concerned with the establishment of a partially contemplative community.
With the exception of the figures of Active and Contemplative Life, the work of the assistants would be better away.
It produces joy in the melancholy, it brings both the contented and the angry man to the knowledge of human misery; it moves the obstinate to compunction, the mundane to penitence, the contemplative to contemplation, and the fearful to shame.
It is well known that if our Blessed Father had lived to return from Lyons, his intention was to retire from the world and its activities in which he had so long taken a part, and to lead henceforth a purelycontemplative life.
This he attributed to exercises of the contemplative life to which he now devoted himself with fervour.
Without it we cannot well lead the contemplative life, and can only lead the active life very imperfectly; without it repose is idleness, and labour only vexation.
The Indians continued to speak in terms of the greatest admiration of this kind old lady, and the certainty that they should never see her face again made them for some days contemplative and sad.
The poor old Doctor was so anxious for the next morning to dawn, that we might be on our way, that he had become quite nervous and entirely contemplative and unsociable.
With a different, yet a stronger interest, I looked up at the picture of Edgar the scholar, with its contemplative student face and pensive eyes.
Now all that science gives is the amor intellectualis of Spinoza, light without warmth, a resignation which is contemplative and grandiose, but inhuman, because it is scarcely transmissible and remains a privilege, one of the rarest of all.
Whatever may be the charm of emotion, I do not know whether it equals the sweetness of those hours of silent meditation, in which we have a glimpse and foretaste of the contemplativejoys of paradise.
Besides, I feel that goodness has no tolerance for thiscontemplative indifference, and that virtue consists in self-conquest.
Pure intelligence and solitary labor might easily lead me to his point of view; but once appeal to the heart, and I feel the contemplative attitude untenable.
The passions which are dominant in the evening, in the morning leave the field free for the contemplative part of the soul.
What saves us from the sorceries of Maïa is conscience; conscience dissipates the narcotic vapors, the opium-like hallucinations, the placid stupor of contemplative indifference.
It favored contemplative habits and the passive virtues, so much needed in turbulent times.
Any man leading such a life of contemplative asceticism and retirement is prone to fall into the belief of special divine illumination.
The contemplative hid themselves in noisome and sepulchral crypts.
How a single cow survived the amount of driving hither and thither they endured, considering their natural love of ease and contemplative habits, is certainly a mystery.
The worthy Professor is severely scientific in his method, and deliberate and cautious in his deductions, the contemplative man discovers as he pursues his theme, and yet the conclusions are, to say the least, remarkable.
The contemplative man consoles himself for the destiny of the species with the lost portion of Kubla Khan.
The contemplative man in his easy-chair, pondering this saying, suddenly beholds in the fire, through the blue haze of his pipe, one of these great unwritten volumes.
The contemplative man has a dim vision of a grimy shed in a back street, where a human being passes dismally through life the while he chips out an unending succession of these cheap urns and obelisks for his employers' retailing.
The contemplative man shivers at the prospect, starts up to poke the fire, and the whole of this remarkable book that is not written vanishes straightway in the smoke of his pipe.
It, too, becomes not a contemplative survey of existence nor an analysis of what is past and done with, but an outlook upon future possibilities with reference to attaining the better and averting the worse.
He is right, however, in preferring, morally speaking, the active to the contemplative life against Aristotle and other philosophers.
In all these, however, it is merelycontemplative philosophy.
This was the poetic, the philosophic, the contemplative side.
She attracted me by her social rebelliousness--another family trait, in me passive not active, contemplative not personal; but she certainly attracted me.
They also led to most painful reactions, in which the poor contemplative believed himself abandoned by God and became a pray to terrible depression and melancholy.
And all men who are raised above their creatureliness into a contemplative life, are united to this divine splendour.
But most gloriously and blessedly of all by a supernatural contemplative life.
Thirdly, we shall explain them by applying them to the superessential and contemplative life, to which few attain and which few can taste, because of the supreme sublimity of this life.
Acquire the contemplative way of seeing how all things change into one another, and constantly attend to it, and exercise thyself about this part [of philosophy].
But the talents of Numerian were rather of the contemplative than of the active kind.
