Quotes About Stillness

This place. It was the noise that impressed me first of all. A terrible racket, yells and whistles, hoots of laughter, arguments, sobs. But there are moments of stillness, too, as if a great fear, or a great sadness, has fallen suddenly, striking us all speechless. The air stands motionless in the corridors, like stagnant water.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

At some point when tending someone you love who is in pain, you reach the edge of a lake, and you look at each other with such joy at the stillness. [Letter unsent]

The silence after a felled tree has fallen is like the silence immediately after a death.

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie—The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

I noticed years ago that when people (myself definitely included) are anxious they tend to busy themselves with irrelevant activities, because these distract from and therefore reduce their actual experience of anxiety. To stay perfectly still is to feel the fear at its maximum intensity, so instead you scuttle around doing things as though you are, in some mysterious way, short of time.

If you listen hard enough, there's almost no such thing as silence: there's just noise that isn't very loud yet.

The land seemed to luxuriate in its silence and its whiteness, knowing that the snow had rendered it more beautiful than before.

The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation.

Thoughts well up in our mind moment by moment. But we refrain from doing anything with our thoughts. We just let everything come up freely and go away freely. We don't grasp anything. We don't try to control anything. We just sit.

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's.

landscape, that vast still life, invites description, not narration. It is lyric. It has no story: it is the beloved, and asks only to be contemplated.

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, 'Create silence'.

I do not like January very much. It is too stationary. Not enough happens. I like the evidences of life, and in January there are too few of them.

Liam learned that it was possible to appear to move forward when you were really standing still.

Sometimes, in life, nothing happens. But, sometimes, nothing happens beautifully.

There is a still point in eternity. There is a still point where all things intersect. There is a still point beyond life, time, and death. Your experience of the still point is enlightenment.

A man gets used to riding on at the break of day. Comes to think that movement and noise is where life is, when after all there's life in stillness and quiet too.

Stop thinking for once in your life!

Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.

The world needs people who are more comfortable standing still. We keep the earth on it axis when everybody else is bouncing around.

All mankind's troubles are caused by one single thing, which is their inability to sit quietly.

When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded places full of life.

Take time, slow down, be still, be awake to the Divine Mystery that looks so common and so ordinary yet is wondrously present.