#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

If the greatest god is the stillness all the motions add up to, then we must ineluctably be included. ↗

— A. R. Ammons

#god #greatest #included #motions #must

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. ↗

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

#features #good #good breeding #marks #person

The point is that when I see a sunset or a waterfall or something, for a split second it's so great, because for a little bit I'm out of my brain, and it's got nothing to do with me. I'm not trying to figure it out, you know what I mean? And I wonder if I can somehow find a way to maintain that mind stillness. ↗

— Chris Evans

#bit #brain #figure #find #got

There's an old adage," he said, "translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages -- "Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die. ↗

— Beryl Markham

#fun #life #nature #quiet #stillness

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

I get those fleeting, beautiful moments of inner peace and stillness - and then the other 23 hours and 45 minutes of the day, I'm a human trying to make it through in this world. ↗

— Ellen DeGeneres

#day #fleeting #get #hours #human

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

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. ↗

— T. S. Eliot

#darkness #light #shall #stillness

What we have to get clear to kids is that when you offer your stillness and open yourself to the experience of music, it pays you back more than you give. ↗

— David Ogden Stiers

#clear #experience #get #give #kids