Nothing is better able to correct our defects of character, give us a keen desire to resemble our Lord, lead us to imitate Him in everything, and arouse the highest virtues in us. Some characters will succeed in reforming themselves only by the loving contemplation of the divine Master; for we imitate those whom we love, without being conscious of doing so.
–Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877–1964)
The secret of Christian contemplation is that it faces us with Jesus Christ toward our suffering world in loving service and just action.
–Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)
To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience as joy, as being. [Every form of intuition and experience] die to be born again on a higher level of life.
–Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
The more I contemplate God, the more God looks on me. The more I pray to him, the more he thinks of me too.
–Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)
Furthermore, while the soul is withdrawn from everything and is turned within, the eye of contemplation is opened and sets itself up a ladder by which it can pass to the contemplation of God. By this contemplation the soul is set on fire for eternal things by the heavenly and divine good things it experiences, and views all the things of time from a distance and as if they were nothing. Hence when we approach God by the way of negation, we first deny him everything that can be experienced by the body, the senses and the imagination, secondly even things experienceable by the intellect, and finally even being itself in so far as it is found in created things. This, so far as the nature of the way is concerned, is the best means of union with God, according to Dionysius.
–Saint Albert the Great (c. 1206-1280)
Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring.
–Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
