Quotes About Stillness

Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the thing you can't hear, and not bothering.

In fact, the room was so quiet you might have heard a drop of paint splash.

Everything was frozen up and silent that morning. Even the wind was silent, but not really dead. It waved about a little and beat its tail gently against the hard sky. There was no sun yet. The sky was empty. It was all frozen up, like a sheet hanging out in the frost.

It's funny when you feel as if you don't want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That's when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running.

She was silence itself.

O t?cere des?vârÅŸit? te îndeamn? la tristeÈ›e, e ca o icoan? a morÈ›ii.

She found her very pale and very still, all the life gone out of her.

Practice non-action. Work without doing.

We must, like a painter, take time to stand back from our work, to be still, and thus see what's what. . . True repose is standing back to survey the activities that fill our days.

There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.

The hardest work of all - doing nothing.

Every day there comes a moment when a person lays his hands in his lap and all his busyness collapses like ashes. The work accomplished is, from the soul's point of view, entirely imaginary.

I just can't sit still and meditate; that doesn't kind of work for me. I don't even know exactly what it means.

Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps — good works.

Allow your head to be quiet. Allow it to be still. Just for an hour and half. Just deal with your body & your breath.

It's so easy to get whisked away in the hubbub of friends, work and busy-ness, but we need to take the time to be still and become aware of ourselves. The small things. The fact that we're still breathing. Our ability to move. The presence of love around and in us. Our strengths. Our opportunities. Our journeys.

I think that if you can convey a kind of a complexity, a mystery, a truth in stillness, that, to me, is really worth striving for, and I totally agree with Michael Fassbender in that less is more. If it's going on inside you, the camera will find it.

When you're still, and some actors are really brilliant at that, you bring a kind of energy to you as opposed to sending the energy out. There are some actors, like Gary Cooper or Kevin Spacey, that are absolutely brilliant - Gene Hackman is another - at being and allowing the audience to just do the work.

Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar.

Silence. Stillness. To give her soul a chance to attend its own affairs at its own level.

Not all speed is movement.

We rarely touch this. We rarely contact this simple moment. So used to constant input and excitement, we lack fine-tuning into all the subtleties of this instant, the ability to register a quiet aliveness without the stirring of expectation.

And sometimes, sitting in my chair I can feel the absence stretching out in all directions– like the deaf, defoliated silence just after a train has thundered past the platform, just before the mindless birds begin to chirp again –and the wildflowers that grow beside the tracks wobble wildly on their little stems, then gradually grow still and stand motherless and vertical in the middle of everything.

Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone's noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it's pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.