“I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”
― David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Go outside. Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring your phone. Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home and we cease to see. We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice. Don’t try to get anything out of it, because you won’t. Don’t try to make use of it, because you can’t. And that’s the point. Just walk, see, sit down if you like. And be. Just be, whatever you are with whatever you have, and realise that that is enough to be happy.
There’s a whole world out there, right outside your window. You’d be a fool to miss it.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

“Be still. Stillness reveals the secrets of eternity”
― Lao Tzu

“Among my stillness was a pounding heart.”
― Shannon A. Thompson, Seconds Before Sunrise

“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

“Feel your emotions,
Live true your passions,
Keep still your mind.”
― Geoffrey M. Gluckman

“Your duty is to be and not to be this or that. 'I am that I am' sums up the whole truth. The method is summed up in the words 'Be still'. What does stillness mean? It means destroy yourself. Because any form or shape is the cause for trouble. Give up the notion that 'I am so and so'. All that is required to realize the Self is to be still. What can be easier than that?”
― Ramana Maharshi

“I woke up early and took the first train to take me away from the city. The noise and all its people. I was alone on the train and had no idea where I was going, and that’s why I went there. Two hours later we arrived in a small town, one of those towns with one single coffee shop and where everyone knows each other’s name. I walked for a while until I found the water, the most peaceful place I know. There I sat and stayed the whole day, with nothing and everything on my mind, cleaning my head. Silence, I learned, is some times the most beautiful sound.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“There is nothing to save, now all is lost,
but a tiny core of stillness in the heart
like the eye of a violet.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Happiness is an undercurrent of sensitivity and leads a surreptitious life: it is an internal eventuality. We can feel it in stillness and it stands the test of time. Joy is an eruption of cheerful moments and we want to express it: it is an external eventuality. We might shout it out, as it conveys a dynamic of fleeting instants. Joy gives voice to “en-joy-ment”. ("The grass was greener over there")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing. The same no-thing. They are externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“When exhilarating joy becomes soothing stillness, it can turn into inspiriting happiness after splintering the brilliance of its buoyancy and filling each pore of our being with bliss, freeing all the caged wishes of our dreams. ("New York at arm's length of desire")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“While retreating timely into a break of reflection, we can conquer the sanity of our mental condition and find a piece of stillness in the flurry of the world. (“Finally unbend.”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The inner is foundation of the outer
The still is master of the restless

The Sage travels all day
yet never leaves his inner treasure”
― Laotzu

“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, West with the Night

“Being still does not mean don't move. It means move in peace.”
― E'yen A. Gardner

“There was a sudden stillness like the gap between ticks on a clock, but the next tick never coming.”
― Sadie Jones, The Outcast

“I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.

In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“Life’s most precious moments are not all loud or uproarious. Silence and stillness has its own virtues.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Do something nice for yourself today. Find some quiet, sit in stillness, breathe. Put your problems on pause. You deserve a break.”
― Akiroq Brost

“Go deeply into the urge to be silent and not the mental interference of how, where and when. If you follow silence to its source you can be taken by it in a moment.”
― Jean Klein, Who Am I?: The Sacred Quest

“When you enter a place of stillness, you awaken the divinity within you.”
― Peggy Sealfon, Escape From Anxiety--Supercharge Your Life with Powerful Strategies from A to Z

“Om is said to be a four-syllable word in Sanskrit, originally as AUM. A, the waking state. U, the dream state. M, the unconscious state. And the fourth, the silence that surrounds it—wherefrom everything arises and whereto everything inevitably returns.

It is the silence that surrounds om that contains everything. It is the silence in your own life that contains and gives birth to everything you have, and everything you will ever need.

It is this same silence we avoid, overlook, and disregard as nothing. The white space of life we abhor. We fill our lives with noise, drama, screens, people, and “stuff” to avoid the void that reminds us of our truth—that beyond flesh that once was not, and will inescapably become not, we are eternal.”
― Drew Gerald

“Don't ever underestimate the value and power of doing nothing sometime.”
― Aditya Ajmera

“I see, he said, that you no longer
wish to resume your former life,
to move, that is, in a straight line as time
suggests we do, but rather (here he gestured toward the lake)
in a circle which aspires to
the stillness at the heart of things,
though I prefer to think it also resembles a clock.”
― Louise Gluck, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“Only your surface is disturbed; in your deepness there is stillness and total tranquility.”
― Bryant McGill