Quotes About Stillness

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.

I always deeply admire people who can stay still in a room and wait for people to come to them.

The best way to meditate is through meditation itself.

I think the bravest thing to write about is nothing, just to write a book in which nothing happens.

You know how you defeat chaos? You suck the air out of it and put it to sleep.

I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives.

I'm not too good at lying still in the sun.

Just have a Sunday where you do nothing. Lay around, cover yourselves in dogs and cats like I like do, and just put on some Netflix. There's so much value I think in just allowing yourself to be still.

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

THE WAIT: It is life in slow motion, it's the heart in reverse, it's a hope-and-a-half: too much and too little at once. It's a train that suddenly stops with no station around, and we can hear the cricket, and, leaning out the carriage door, we vainly contemplate a wind we feel that stirs the blooming meadows, the meadows made imaginary by this stop.

Great sadnesses … they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben

It is quite rare to encounter a truly creative and productive person who resides in his own stillness or simply in the midst of his melody, close to the honest beating of his heart!

schließlich wollte ich Ihnen ja auch nur raten, still und ernst durch Ihre Entwicklung durchzuwachsen; Sie können sie gar nicht heftiger stören, als wenn Sie nach außen sehen und von außen Antwort erwarten auf Fragen, die nur Ihr innerstes Gefühl in Ihrer leisesten Stunde vielleicht beantworten kann.

It is good to say it out loud: 'Nothing happened.' Once more: 'Nothing happened.' Does that help at all?

And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and static moment when our future comes upon us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and accidental point when it happens to us as if from the outside.

With the help of such impressions you regain your composure, win your way back out of the demands of the talking and chattering multtude (how voluble it is!), and you slowly learn to recognize the very few things in which something everlasting can be felt, something you can love, something solitary in which you can take part in silence.

if you don't, you're already dead anyway. Now hush, because you're simply thinking words, old saws. So hush…all is noise.

power ceases in the instant of repose, it resides in the moment of transition

We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

How are we to know that the mind has become concentrated? Because the idea of time will vanish. The more time passes un-noticed the more concentrated we are . . . All time will have the tendency to come and stand in the one present. So the definition is given, when the past and present come and stand in one, the mind is said to be concentrated."—Vivekananda

The quieter you become the more you can hear.

Thinking little at all about nothing in particular.

Chapter 31 NOTHING MUCH else happened, all the rest of that night.