#stillness

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head. ↗

— Paul Auster

#choice #comfort #comsolation #escape #pleasure

As spiritual searchers we need to become freer and freer of the attachment to our own smallness in which we get occupied with me-me-me. Pondering on large ideas or standing in front of things which remind us of a vast scale can free us from acquisitiveness and competitiveness and from our likes and dislikes. If we sit with an increasing stillness of the body, and attune our mind to the sky or to the ocean or to the myriad stars at night, or any other indicators of vastness, the mind gradually stills and the heart is filled with quiet joy. Also recalling our own experiences in which we acted generously or with compassion for the simple delight of it without expectation of any gain can give us more confidence in the existence of a deeper goodness from which we may deviate. (39) ↗

— Ravi Ravindra

#compassion #confidence #expectations #generosity #goodness

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made. ↗

— Gore Vidal

#cannot #choose #literature #lose #made

Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn't get to have. ↗

— Ann Brashares

#beautiful #heaven #lost-city #stillness #vision

Being still does not mean don't move. It means move in peace. ↗

— E'yen A. Gardner

#peace #stillness #life

One can observe that such changes in the breath are the direct result of your reaction to thoughts. If you can simply dismiss the thoughts by giving them no value then the breathing will find its own medium and become subtle. ↗

— Stephen Richards

#mindfullness #stephen-richards #stillness-of-the-mind #change

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#impermanence #insight #mujo #philosophy #stillness

The sound of 'gentle stillness' after all the thunder and wind have passed will the ultimate Word from God. ↗

— Jim Elliot

#gentle #god #passed #sound #stillness

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain. ↗

— Pico Iyer

#buddhism #japan #kyoto #quiet #stillness

There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life—I repeat, everything—is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness. ↗

— Thomas Ligotti

#stillness #why-humans-use-drugs #life