A Quote by Madeleine L'Engle

When we can play with the unself-conscious concentration of a child, this is: art: prayer: love.

Madeleine L'Engle

Quote Topics

Art Child Concentration Conscious Love Play Prayer Self-Conscious

Quote Author

Madeleine L'Engle
American - Writer
November 29, 1918 - September 6, 2007

What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.

Annie Dillard

The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself.

Madeleine L'Engle

Prayer and contemplation are both exercises in concentration. The normal deluge of conscious thought is restricted and the mind is brought to one conscious area of operation. The results are those you find in any concentrative practice: deep calm, a physiological slowing of the metabolism and a sense of peace and wellbeing

Henepola Gunaratana

I liked his voice, rich and unself-conscious even when he forgot words and hummed to fill in the gap. What I didn't understand, I imagined, and thus it became a love song.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Prayer is a fine, delicate instrument. To use it right is a great art, a holy art. There is perhaps no greater art than the art of prayer. Yet the least gifted, the uneducated and the poor can cultivate the holy art of prayer.

Ole Hallesby

Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are - hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.

Thomas Ligotti

Prayer is the highest form, the supreme act of the Creative Imagination. ... For prayer is not a request for something: it is the expression of a mode of being, a means of existing and of causing to exist, ... The organ of Prayer is the heart, the psychospiritual organ, with its concentration of energy, its himma. ... Prayer is a "creator" of vision, ... .

Henry Corbin

Be creative in that sense and your creativity will become an offering to God. God has given you so many gifts, Garima; something HAS to be done just in deep thankfulness. But remember: with no motive, not as a means but as an end unto itself. Art for art's sake, and creation for creation's sake, and love for love's sake, and prayer for prayer's sake.

Rajneesh

Great acting can be almost a psychotic mix of self-consciousness and unself-consciousness. And thats the terrible conflict. You have to be free to jump off into that volcano and you have to be pathologically self-conscious.

Alec Baldwin

We think rightly or wrongly about prayer according to the conception we have in our minds of prayer. If we think of prayer as the breath in our lungs and the blood from our hearts, we think rightly. The blood flows ceaselessly, and breathing continues ceaselessly; we are not conscious of it, but it is always going on. We are not always conscious of Jesus keeping us in perfect joint with God, but if we are obeying Him, He always is.

Oswald Chambers

My prayer is simple my dear one, my dear one. May you never need understand. My prayer is for peacetime, my child, my child. Live it well and this life can be grand.

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Like all good things, prayer requires some discipline. Yet I believe that life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. Prayer includes moments of ecstasy and also dullness, mindless distraction and acute concentration, flashes of joy and bouts of irritation. In other words, prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter.

Philip Yancey

The devil resists serious, focused prayer because he's defeated by it. And so the devil will try to attack our concentration in prayer; he will try to confuse or contradict the content of our prayers; he will do his best to distract and/or divert us in prayer so that we're crippled by inconsistency.

Anne Graham Lotz

It can happen that when we are at prayer some brothers come to see us. Then we have to choose either to interrupt our prayer or to sadden our brother by refusing to answer him. But love is greater than prayer. Prayer is one virtue among others, whereas love contains them all.

John Climacus

A conscious parent is not one who seeks to fix her child or seek to produce or create the 'perfect' child. This is not about perfection. The conscious parent understands that is journey has been undertaken, this child has been called forth to 'raise the parent' itself. To show the parent where the parent has yet to grow. This is why we call our children into our lives.