Quotes posted this week to social media (Facebook, Instagram, X) this past week tackle the theme of action and contemplation, especially as it intersects society.

The contemplative has a compassionate heart… The little ones and the discarded will always be there to offer us an opportunity to enable contemplation to be a window open to beauty, truth, and goodness… Contemplation would merely be momentary if it were to be reduced to raptures and ecstasies that distance us from the joys and worries of the people. We must be wary of the contemplative who is not compassionate. — Pope Francis

They are not true contemplatives if they do not achieve liberation from all the historical alienations—wealth, fear, death—through the courage to exist in faith. Otherwise, contemplation would be a flight and an escape, and could be motivated out of fear and laziness. The authenticity of the motivation does not take long to make itself visible, to make itself a sign, because contemplation matures in a free and prophetic look at creation and history. — Arturo Paoli

It is proper to these souls [who experience contemplation and set aside time for it] that they communicate in the work and the dreams of men with as much fervour and intensity (but purified of all worldly interests) as those whose entire existence is fixed at such a level. — Jacques Maritain

If we knew how to contemplate at length, in quiet, the wounds of Christ and to let ourselves be pervaded by the peaceful force of liberation, by the flow emanating from his wounded person, we would find within ourselves the way to freedom. — Arturo Paoli

God is… our Creator, our truth, our happiness—so much so that the effort to look on Him, and to center our heart in Him which we call contemplation, is the highest, the most perfect act of the spirit, the act which even today can and must be at the apex of all human activity. — Pope Saint Paul VI

It is fitting that the rays of the sun should shine upon that root which has been planted in the Holy Spirit, and that a gentle rain should moisten it, for a good field which brings forth good fruit flourishes in the sun and the rain and the dew. — Saint Hildegard of Bingen