Quotes & Thoughts

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

Mahatma Gandhi

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

Eckhart Tolle

The experience of silence

One day, people came to a hermit. They asked him, "What sense do you see in a life of silence?" He was busy drawing water from a cistern. "Look into the cistern, what do you see?", he asked them. The visitors answered, "We see nothing." After a while, the hermit challenged them again, "Look into the cistern, what do you see?". They looked down and said, "Now we see ourselves." The hermit said, "As I drew the water earlier, the water was restless, and you could see nothing. Now the water is calm, and you recognize yourself. That is the experience of silence!"

(author unknown)

"Happiness is a butterfly," said the master. "Follow him and he will escape you. Sit down and he will rest on your shoulder."

"So what should I do to get happiness?" the student asked.

"Stop being after it."

"But is there nothing I can do?"

"You could try to sit down quietly, if you dare."

Anthony de Mello

The human of our days lacks silence, the external and still more the inner silence, that is, a condition that enables one, in the outer noise and rush of life, to experience silence, to preserve it and to radiate it. There is the special silence as a state that has nothing to do with "noise or non-noise", yes, indeed more: for which the external noise can be a background from which stands out inwardly, which can not be disturbed by any noise. That's the right silence. It is a condition of the mind, a state of the soul, where the noise of the world is transformed into a "background noise", in  which the inner silence fully develops and becomes conscious.

Karlfried Graf Dürckheim

Silence is more than the absence of noise, more than the missing of words.
Silence challenges us to face our own truth.
Silence is a condition, something which meets humans.
The silence is there before man does something.
Silence has its own quality.
It is the quality of pure being.
In silence, something breaks open that we can no longer name.
It's the secret as such.
In silence, the essence of things comes to the fore.

Anselm Grün