Quotes About Peace

There was something satisfying in a cessation of paddling on smooth water. It was like watching a flock of ducks all stop beating at once and sail over a bank of trees on extended wings.

She also confessed that in an odd way she was happier here than she'd ever been. Even with all the loss. Happier being whatever that was. Than waiting.

You rest now. Rest for longer than you are used to resting. Make a stillness around you, a field of peace. Your best work, the best time of your life will grow out of this peace. And don't worry, compa, you will be rowdy and out of control again. You will throw off every kind of light. You can't help yourself.

And a spiderweb's gleamings in the exposed roots of a cut bank. And in a tailwater pool: the spreading rings of rising trout, dapping silently like slow rain.

I stood knee deep in the cold water, eyes closed, and listened to the end of the day over the river. Then I opened my eyes and pulled the line and began making long casts upstream just off the bank. The new rod was light and alive in my hand, it was beautiful, and the line sang out fast and smooth with a whisper like scratching a guitar string. I didn't mind the sound at all.

This is how I healed. Or didn't. One evening I took her down to the river. We turned off the highway and rattled slowly up the gravel road and into the heart of the canyon. The walls closed in above us, the high blue of the sky deeper, deep and dark like a river is deep. The highest rock at the rim was a strip of fire, holding the last long sun. The old gorge was a vessel and it was filling with shadow, slowly and with wind.

That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace.

I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.

I stood back of the new garden watching the sun touch the mountains and ruddle the turned dirt and the threads of water and I can say there was something moving inside that resembled a kind of happiness. I would never have named it. Not then. For fear. But I name it now.

But for now, my point is simply that on the seventh day, it appears that there are no losers. So if you need some losers to feel like a winner, you may not like the seventh day.

I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without awareness that I'm carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

She wished, sometimes, that she could trust God, and surrender all her concerns to Him. How much simpler that would make everything.

of isolation.

is amazing how many people, if granted just one wish, would ask for "world peace". If it is such a common desire, why has it not happened? Is it because we can't visualize what is required for it to occur? Or because we cannot imagine what such a world would look like? Is it that we just don't recognize the major impediments, or is it because those impediments are a part of our long-standing, indoctrinated belief systems and therefore too difficult for

The species in which peace and mutual support are the rule, prosper, while the unsociable species decay.

And by the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on that day He rested from all His work.

Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on that day He rested from all the work of creation that He had accomplished.

And behold, the dove returned to him in the evening with a freshly plucked olive leaf in her beak. So Noah knew that the waters had receded from the earth.

So Abram said to Lot, “Please let there be no contention between you and me, or between your herdsmen and my herdsmen. After all, we are brothers.

You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a ripe old age.

Let a little water be brought, that you may wash your feet and rest yourselves under the tree.

And Abimelech said, “Look, my land is before you. Settle wherever you please.”

So Abraham brought sheep and cattle and gave them to Abimelech, and the two men made a covenant.