Quotes About Stillness

And it's only by going nowhere- by sitting still or letting my mind relax- that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

Sitting still is a way of falling in love with the world and everyone in it.

I went to visit Alcatraz years ago when I was on tour with the Pistols, and I really liked the atmosphere of the place. I genuinely, really, thoroughly enjoyed the whole morning there. I just liked the quietness and stillness of what is basically a cruel prison complex. I still found some kind of joy in that. That's how I am.

Grave silence is far more powerful than the same old voices yapping away.

I don't seek power and do not run around.

I have two settings: full speed and stop.

Meditation will sharpen your senses and your awareness.

All we can do is find the courage to stand still and to look backwards.

How great is it to just rest and be happy and not move when you don't have to.

The deeper your concentration, the deeper the potential for mindfulness.

In attending to the breath with onepointed concentration, everything else falls away—including thoughts, feelings, the outside world. Samadhi is characterized by absorption in stillness and undisturbed peacefulness.

Every time you get a strong impulse to talk about meditation and how wonderful it is, or how hard it is, or what it's doing for you these days, or what it's not, or you want to convince someone else how wonderful it would be for them, just look at it as more thinking and go meditate some more.

Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? LAO-TZU, Tao-te-Ching

But meditation is not just about sitting, either. It is about stopping and being present, that is all.

When Thoreau says, "it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished," this is waving a red flag in front of a bull for go-getting, progress-oriented people. But who is to say that his realizations of one morning spent in his doorway are less memorable or have less merit than a lifetime of busyness, lived with scant appreciation for stillness and the bloom of the present moment?

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are. Perhaps its value lies precisely in this. Maybe we all need to do one thing in our lives simply for its own sake.

Meditation is a way of being, not a technique.

There really is no place to go in this moment. We are already here. Can we be here fully? There really is nothing do to. Can we let go into non-doing, into pure being? There really is nothing to attain, no special "state" or "feeling," because whatever you are experiencing in this moment is already special, already extraordinary, by virtue of the fact that it is being experienced.

The mountain image held in the mind's eye and in the body can freshen our memory of why we are sitting in the first place, and of what it truly means, each time we take our seat, to dwell in the realm of non-doing. Mountains are quintessentially emblematic of abiding presence and stillness.

Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment.

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 first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated into dayness.

You see more sitting still than chasing after.

Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless.

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 first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness. Patty waited for this to happen before she left the bathroom.