Stillness Quotes - Page 12

• The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness.

  Paul Goodman

  Jobs, Real, Hard Work

  Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.41, New York Review of Books

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• Friends come back from their worship with a new sense of ordination, but not the ordination of human hands. Something has happened in the stillness that makes the heart more tender, more sensitive, more shocked by evil, more dedicated to ideals of life, and more eager to push back the skirts of darkness and to widen the area of light and love.

  Rufus Jones

  Heart, Light, Hands

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• If a problem looks difficult, relax. If it looks impossible, relax even more. Then begin encouraging small changes, putting just enough pressure on yourself to move one turtle step forward. Then rest, savor, celebrate. Then step again. You’ll find that slow is fast, gentle is powerful, and stillness moves mountains.

  Martha Beck

  Powerful, Moving, Small Changes

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• Hopefully there will come a time when I have no words, when I can honor and hold that kind of stillness that I so need, crave, and desire in the natural world.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Honor, Desire, Needs

  Terry Tempest Williams (2006). “A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams”, Utah State Univ Pr

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• Yoga ia a way of moving into stillness in order to experience the truth of who you are.

  Erich Schiffmann

  Inspirational, Truth, Moving

  Erich Schiffmann (2013). “Yoga The Spirit And Practice Of Moving Into Stilln”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

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• The world is full of noise. Might we not set ourselves to learn silence, stillness solitude?

  Elisabeth Elliot

  Christian, Silence, Solitude

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• Peter Townsend Music is the silence between the notes.. So could it be said that dance is the stillness between the steps?

  Claude Debussy

  Dance, Silence, Steps

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• To get at the core of God at his greatest, one must first get to the core of himself at his least, for no one can know God who has not first known himself. This core is a simple stillness, which is unmoved itself but by whose immobility all things are moved and all receive life.

  Meister Eckhart

  Spiritual, Simple, Firsts

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• Sit all together in meditation. Become peacefully calm and quiet, without motion, without stillness, without birth, without destruction, without coming or going, with no judgments of right or wrong, neither staying nor going. This, then, is the Great Way.

  Huineng

  Determination, Meditation, Together

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• My heart is a garden tired with autumn,
  Heaped with bending asters and dahlias heavy and dark,
  In the hazy sunshine, the garden remembers April,
  The drench of rains and a snow-drop quick and clear as a spark;
  Daffodils blowing in the cold wind of morning,
  And golden tulips, goblets holding the rain -
  The garden will be hushed with snow, forgotten soon, forgotten -
  After the stillness, will spring come again?

  Sara Teasdale

  Morning, Spring, Rain

  Sara Teasdale, “The Garden”

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• The stillness of the early morning scene enables me to take in and enjoy many things which pass me by during the bustle of the day. First, there are the scents, which seem even more generous with their offerings than they are in the evening.

  Rosemary Verey

  Morning, Offering, Generosity

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• An horrible stillness first invades our ear, And in that silence we the tempest fear.

  John Dryden

  Fear, Silence, Ears

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• The non-action of the wise man is not inaction. It is not studied. It is not shaken by anything. The sage is quiet because he is not moved, not because he wills to be quiet. . . . Joy does all things without concern. For emptiness, stillness, tranquillity, tastelessness, silence, and non-action are the root of all things.

  Zhuangzi

  Wise, Men, Roots

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• In the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am - unbound.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Mind, Saws, Unbound

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• Great spiritual traditions are used as a means to ripen us, to bring us face to face with our life, and to help us to see in a new way by developing a stillness of mind and a strength of heart.

  Jack Kornfield

  Spiritual, Heart, Mean

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• Sometimes I perceive that there is a stillness and a wholeness in the world or in some portion or corner or fragment of the world or some little place in time where things just feel so right and huge and powerful and easy that I will have the perhaps blasphemous thought maybe there are layers of heaven.

  Rick Bass

  Powerful, Heaven, World

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• Awareness means to listen to me unfocused - alert of course, not fallen asleep, but alert to these birds, their chirping, alert to the wind that passes through the trees, alert to everything that is happening. Concentration excludes much, includes little. Awareness excludes nothing, includes all. Awareness is a state of no-mind. You are, yet you are not focused. You are just a mirror reflecting all, echoing all; see the beauty of it and the silence and the stillness.

  Rajneesh

  Mean, Mirrors, Wind

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• Things flourish, then each returns to its root. Returning to the root is called stillness: Stillness is called return to life, return to life is called the constant; knowing the constant is called enlightenment.

  Laozi

  Spiritual, Roots, Knowing

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• What exists in truth is the Self alone. The world, the individual soul and God are appearances in it. Like silver in mother-of-pearl, these three appear at the same time and disappear at the same time. The Self is that where there is absolutely no 'I thought'. That is called 'Stillness'. The Self itself is the world; the Self itself is 'I'; the Self itself is God; all is Siva, the Self.

  Ramana Maharshi

  Mother, Spiritual, Self

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• Ten properties of an object, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness.

  Robert Bresson

  Distance, Dark, Light

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• The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Men, Blue, White

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• Then I played the song that hides in the center of me. That wordless music that moves through the secret places in my heart. I played it carefully, strumming it slow and low into the dark stillness of the night. I would like to say it is a happy song, that it is sweet and bright, but it is not.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Song, Sweet, Moving

  Patrick Rothfuss (2011). “The Wise Man's Fear: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day Two”, p.740, Penguin

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• There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe.

  Mervyn Peake

  Air, Silence, Scythes

  Mervyn Peake (2008). “Titus Alone”, p.110, The Overlook Press

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• As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.

  Sylvia Plath

  White, Bed, Ceilings

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.18, Hamilton Books

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• Selflessness implies fun. Its fun to be free. Freedom is inner stillness and not being haunted by your desires, your fears, your aggressive tendencies ... it's being cool.

  Frederick Lenz

  Karma, Fun, Yoga

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