Quotes About Stillness

They really knew how to work this edge, the Dutch painters?ripeness sliding into rot. The fruit's perfect but it won't last, it's about to go. And see here especially," she said, reaching over my shoulder to trace the air with her finger, "this passage?the butterfly." The underwing was so powdery an delicate it looked as if the color would smear if she touched it. "How beautiful he plays it. Stillness with a tremble of movement.

Dead flowers stood rotting in the massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the air almost too stale to breathe, the exact, suffocating feel of our apartment when Mrs. Barbour took me back to Sutton Place to get some things I needed. It was a stillness I knew; this was a house closed in on itself when someone died.

Nobody said anything. Dust motes floated in a sunbeam.

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

Skill in concentrating and steadying the mind is the basis for all types of meditation.

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather around us, that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even a fiercer life because of our quiet. William Butler Yeats

Be rigorously mindful of the awareness of touch. We should be rigorously, ardently, intensively mindful. Do not rest when tired, scratch when itched, nor shift when cramped. We should keep our bodies and minds absolutely still and strive till the end. The uncomfortable truly is the norm; the comfortable will set us adrift on the current of illusion.

Genuine spiritual practice requires us to learn how to stop the war. This is a first step, but actually it must be practiced over and over until it becomes our way of being. The inner stillness of a person who truly "is peace" brings peace to the whole interconnected web of life, both inner and outer. To stop the war, we need to begin with ourselves.

Samadhi doesn't just come of itself; it takes practice.

Bring yourself back to the point quite gently. And even if you do nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back a thousand times, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

When we take time to quiet ourselves, we can all sense that our life could be lived with greater compassion and greater weakness.

In sitting on the meditation cushion and assuming the meditation posture, we connect ourselves with the present moment in this body and on this earth.

Meditation practice is neither holding on nor avoiding; it is a settling back into the moment, opening to what is there.

Being still and doing nothing are two completely different things.

Je respire comme une pierre

There is a certain space within you which never gets disturbed, which is never in any kind of turmoil; a space which cannot be touched by outside situations.

Tiene uno, como la naturaleza, sus estaciones, sus ciclos de vida? En el curso de quince o veinte días pasa una primavera y un verano en el fondo del alma, y luego viene un día violento en que nos quedamos sin hojas, y fríos, e inmóviles.

the disquieting hour before dawn when it feels as if no one else is alive.

No clamor, only the thick quietude of crumpled talk.

The man said somehow he was sure he was—dead—the minute he saw him. He doesn't know how. Just some special kind of stillness.

La gente lee en silencio, se mueve en silencio, hasta parece hablar en silencio

In silence lies safety.

With her make-up-free complexion and nondescript brown hair gathered in a scrappy up-do, she looks like someone for whom there are more important things than being thought pretty. She might be an academic, or an assistant in the better sort of a bookshop. But there's something about her—a stillness, a fixity of gaze—that tells another story.

We try to abolish intervals by our manic insistence on keeping busy, on doing something. And as a result, all we succeed in doing is destroying all hope of tranquility. ... . You have to learn to immerse yourself in the silences between.