Quotes about Stillness

Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions — "Will you fade? Will you perish?" — scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain.

Empty, empty, empty, silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence.

A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.

[W]hen the faculties are empty, then your whole being listens.

Who can (make) the muddy water (clear)? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear.

The snow whispered down in the stillness and the sparks rose and dimmed and died in the eternal blackness.

Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

The command is Do no work. Just make space. Attend to what is around you. Learn that you don't have to DO to BE. Accept the grace of doing nothing. Stay with it until you stop jerking and squirming.

Make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

There is time, and then there is timelessness. And if you're lucky, and if you can be still enough, observant enough, you may be able to know and speak about that intersection of time and timelessness, or time and eternity.

He has come into a wakefulness as quiet as sleep.

Look in and see him looking out. He is not always quiet, but there have been times when happiness has come to him, unasked, like the stillness on the water that holds the evening clear while it subsides - and he let go what he was not.