Quiet The Mind Quotes

“Did you eat my Twinkies?"
She gulped. Keeping her eyes glued to the whip, she said, "Exactly what Twinkies are we talking about?"
"The Twinkies in the cupboard over the sink. The only Twinkies in the trailer." His fingers convulsed around the coils of leather.
Oh, Lord, she thought. Flayed to death for a Twinkle.
"Well?"
"It, uh - it won't happen again, I promise you. But they didn't have any special marking on them, so there was no way I could tell they were yours." Her eyes remained riveted on the whip. "And normally I wouldn't have eaten them- I never eat junk food--but I was hungry last night, and, well, when you think about it, you'll have to admit I did you a favor because they're clogging my arteries now instead of yours."
His voice was quiet. Too quiet. In her mind she heard the howl of a rampaging Cossack baying at a Russian moon. "Don't touch my Twinkies. Ever. If you want Twinkies, buy your own.”

— Susan Elizabeth Phillips

“O night, O sweetest time, though black of hue,
with peace you force all the restless work to end;
those who exalt you see and understand,
and he is sound of mind who honours you.
You cut the thread of tired thoughts, for so
you offer calm in your moist shade; you send
to this low sphere the dreams where we ascend
up to the highest, where I long to go.
Shadow of death that brings to quiet close
all miseries that plague the heart and soul,
for those in pain the last and best of cures;
you heal the flesh of its infirmities,
dry and our tears and shut away our toil,
and free the good from wrath and fretting cares.”

— Michelangelo Buonarroti

“The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it is almost impossible to achieve. When you strive for quiet, you become impatient, and impatience is itself a noiseless noise. You can block every superficial sound, but, with each new layer extinguished, a next rises up, finer and more entrapping, until you arrive at last in the infinite attitude of your own riotous mind. Inside is where all the memories last like wells, and the unspoken wishes like golden buds, and the pain that you keep, lingering and implicit, staying inside, nesting inside, articulating, articulating, through to the day you die. (p. 240)”

— Hilary Thayer Hamann

“Because oftentimes the quiet mind could see and hear things the busy mind could not.”

— Brenna Aubrey

“Quiet pragmatism, of course, lacks the romance of vocal militancy. But I felt myself more a mediator than a crusader. My strengths were reasoning, crafting compromises, finding the good and the good faith on both sides of an argument, and using that to build a bridge. Always, my first question was, what's the goal? And then, who must be persuaded if it is to be accomplished? A respectful dialogue with one's opponent almost invariably goes further than a harangue outside his or her window. If you want to change someone's mind, you must understand what need shapes his or her opinion. To prevail, you must first listen.”

— Sonia Sotomayor

“Theology is
or should be
a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music ... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.”

— Karen Armstrong

“Breathing meditation can quiet the mind, open the body, and develop a great power of concentration.”

— Jack Kornfield

“This country life doesn't look so bad from the window. It melts your heart. It warms your soul.lets you think about the possibility of quiet and how quiet is beautiful when seen through the proper lenses and mind-set.”

— Jason Myers

“I turned up the inane sound effects and let them fill the room, setting up an atmosphere of mind-body pollution while Miss Chianti and I got better acquainted. A couple of glasses had me convinced that she's a real sweetheart, though a protracted rendezvous was probably going to leave me regretting the entire encounter. It's always the quiet ones that come back to bite you.”

— Alice Yi-Li Yeh

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“About five seconds after I left you today, things between you and
me, they changed," he informed me in a quiet voice.
I felt my brows draw together as my mind processed the fact that
this was not good.
"Changed?" I asked. "How?"
"You got attitude, the kind I like. So I decided I'm gonna ride that
attitude wave of yours, see how things work out.”

— Kristen Ashley

“A Muslim woman must not feel wild, or free, or any of the other emotions and longings I felt when I read those books. A Muslim girl does not make her own decisions or seek control. She is trained to be docile. If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you. In Islam, becoming an individual is not a necessary development; many people, especially women, never develop a clear individual will. You submit: that is the literal meaning of the word islam: submission. The goal is to become quiet inside, so that you never raise your eyes, not even inside your mind. But”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.”

— Camille Paglia

“Fucking shut up, you whining cow, you didn't mind spending the money!' yelled Simon, his jaw jutting again; and Andrew wanted to roar at his mother to stay silent: she blabbed when any idiot could have told her she should keep quiet, and she kept quiet when she might have done good by speaking out; she never learned, she never saw any of it coming.”

— J.K. Rowling

“I closed my eyes, feeling the tug of the books. This was my refuge, my fortress of solitude. Standing in this quiet cave, surrounded by walls of books, was normally enough to ease my mind no matter how stressful things got . . . but not today. Today the books called to me. Every one was a gateway to magic, waiting to be unlocked.”

— Jim C. Hines

“They fell quiet looking at the garden. They seemed a little sad, somehow pained, but at the same time perplexed. As though they were looking at their own thoughts and not seeing what they were actually looking at, not seeing the plants of the garden, the fig trees, and the hiding places of the crickets. But what can you see in thoughts? Pain, grief, hope, curiosity, longing, all those things stay with you to the end and your mind will wear itself out if you don't put something else in there, where did I hear that, your mind will be like two millstones with no grist between them. Then: you go crazy!”

— Orhan Pamuk

“This is its ancient soul, the quiet place, away from all its beats and rhythms. And my mind is unable to comprehend the sheer expanse of it. It's as though I've suddenly blinked and found myself standing on a tightrope strung between two skyscrapers. I am paralysed by awe. The feeling you get when confronted by something infinite and inevitable and indifferent to you.”

— Kirsty Eagar

“Give your mind a lot of space and it quiets down; try to control, quiet, or restrict it, and it goes wild.”

— Steve Hagen

“It was a while before my mind was quiet enough for reading. The conversation with Shevraeth I was determined not to think about. What was the use? It was over, and it was clear it wasn't going to be repeated.
Recalling the name he'd mentioned, Lady Trishe
one of the names Bran had spoken earlier that morning
I realized it was Shevraeth they were planning to go riding with. She wouldn't enjoy this ride was what Nee had said, meaning that I wouldn't enjoy it because Shevraeth would be along. What it probably also meant, I realized glumly, was that they wouldn't enjoy having me along if I glared at Shevraeth and started squabbling.”

— Sherwood Smith

“The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

— Albert Einstein

“And, finally, I noticed that a hot flush was spreading over me, and that the look in his eyes was doing more to me than Jesse's kisses had. Dimitri was quiet and distant sometimes, but he also had a dedication and an intensity that I'd never seen in any other person. I wondered how that kind of power and strength translated into ... well, sex. I wondered what it'd be like for him to touch me and-shit!
What was I thinking? Was I out of my mind? Embarrassed, I covered my feelings with attitude.
"You see something you like?" I asked.
"Get dressed.”

— Richelle Mead

“Listening Without Thought I do not know whether you have listened to a bird. To listen to something demands that your mind be quiet-not a mystical quietness, but just quietness. I am telling you something, and to listen to me you have to be quiet, not have all kinds of ideas buzzing in your mind. When you look at a flower, you look at it, not naming it, not classifying it, not saying that it belongs to a certain species-when you do these, you cease to look at it. Therefore, I am saying that it is one of the most difficult things to listen-to listen to the communist, to the socialist, to the congressman, to the capitalist, to anybody, to your wife, to your children, to your neighbor, to the bus conductor, to the bird-just to listen. It is only when you listen without the idea, without thought, that you are directly in contact; and being in contact, you will understand whether what he is saying is true or false; you do not have to discuss. JANUARY 4”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank You for this place in which we dwell, for the love accorded us this day, for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food and the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends, soften us to our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors; if it may not, give us strength to endure that which is to come that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another. We beseech of you this help and mercy for Christ's sake.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

“If We Sit With An Increasing Stillness Of The BodyThe Mind Gradually Stills And The Heart Is Filled With Quiet Joy”

— Ravi Ravindra

“Demon pox, oh demon pox
Just how is it acquired?
One must go down to the bad part of town
Until one is very tired.
Demon pox, oh demon pox, I had it all along
Not the pox, you foolish blocks,
I mean this very song
For I was right, and you were wrong!"
"Will!" Charlotte shouted over the noise, "Have you LOST YOUR MIND? CEASE THAT INFERNAL RACKET! Jem-"
Jem, rising to his feet, clapped his hands over Will's mouth. "Do you promise to be quiet?" he hissed into his friend's ear.
Will nodded, blue eyes blazing. Tessa was staring at him in amazement; they all were. She had seen Will many things-amused, bitter, condescending, angry, pitying-but never giddy before.
Jem let him go. "All right, then."
Will slid to the floor, his back against the armchair, and threw up his arms. "A demon pox on all your houses!" he announced, and yawned.
"Oh, God, weeks of pox jokes," said Jem. "We're in for it now.”

— Cassandra Clare

“Singing is my pleasure, but not in church, for the parson said the gargoyles must remain on the outside, not seek room in the choir stalls. So I sing inside the mountain of my flesh, and my voice is as slender as a reed and my voice has no lard in it. When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and nowhere I have been. But does it matter if the place cannot be mapped as long as I can still describe it?”

— Jeanette Winterson

“The artist reconstructs the world to his plan. The symphonies of
nature know no rests. The world is never quiet; even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in
vibrations that escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a
chord, never a melody. Music exists, however, in which symphonies are completed, where melody gives
its form to sounds that by themselves have none, and where, finally, a particular arrangement of notes
extracts from natural disorder a unity that is satisfying to the mind and the heart.”

— Albert Camus

“When we slow down, quiet the mind, and allow ourselves to feel hungry for something that we do not understand, we are dipping into the abundant well of spiritual longing.”

— Elizabeth Lesser

“The most powerful prayer, one well-nigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is. To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own.”

— Meister Eckhart

“Right underneath your thoughts and negative emotions exists an ocean of love. You have but to quiet the mind to experience it.”

— Barbara Ann Kipfer

“It is all your desires that you see, when you think. But when your mind is quiet, without desire, you are complete and as wonderful as you have always been.”

— H.W.L. Poonja

“Silence allows you to watch your mind and become aware of the thoughts that you may be acting on unconsciously. When you see the thoughts, you can make a conscious choice to act on the thought or change your mind, instead of going along with the noise. I have seen people who don't want to look at themselves keep going until something happens that makes them stop - a sickness or an accident - but it gives them that reflective, quiet space where they can face what is difficult in their mind. We each have a unique purpose to fulfill in this life and inklings can come in those quiet moments.”

— Sivananda Radha Saraswati

“THE LONG WALK is a raw, wrenching, blood-soaked chronicle of the human cost of war. Brian Castner, the leader of a military bomb disposal team, recounts his deployment to Iraq with unflinching candor, and in the process exposes crucial truths not only about this particular conflict, but also about war throughout history. Castner's memoir brings to mind Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front.”

— Jon Krakauer

“I have a terrible image in my mind of a cow going to slaughter. There's not a lot of fight in them. Pigs, they'd squeal and thrash around. They'd fight. It's almost as if cows don't know they have a choice. Not that they don't panic, but they do so in a quiet way.”

— Cloris Leachman

“Meditation is a vital way to purify and quiet the mind, thus rejuvenating the body.”

— Deepak Chopra

“A quiet mind is more important than a positive mind.”

— Deepak Chopra

“There are strange moments in life when the mind rests without any kind of worries. When our mind is quiet, when our mind is in silence, then the new arrives.”

— Samael Aun Weor

“Beneath the sophistication of Buddhist psychology lies the simplicity of compassion. We can touch into this compassion whenever the mind is quiet, whenever we allow the heart to open.”

— Jack Kornfield

“To the quiet mind all things are possible.”

— Meister Eckhart

“When we meditate, what we actually do is enter into a vacant, calm, still, silent mind. We go deep within and approach our true existence, which is our soul. When we live in the soul, we feel that we are actually meditating spontaneously. On the surface of the sea are multitudes of waves, but the sea is not affected below. In the deepest depths, at the bottom of the sea is all tranquility. So when you start meditating, try to feel your own inner existence first. That is to say, the bottom of the sea: calm and quiet. Feel that your whole being is surcharged with peace and tranquility.”

— Sri Chinmoy

“Prayer is the peace of our spirit, the stillness of our thoughts, the evenness of recollection, the seat of meditation, the rest of our cares and the calm of our tempest; prayer is the issue of a quiet mind, of untroubled thoughts, it is the daughter of charity, and the sister of meekness.”

— Jeremy Taylor

“Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.”

— John Cage

“Why make art ? To quiet the mind thus making it susceptible to divine influences.”

— John Cage

“Part of what we seek in Buddhism is the sense of quiet observation. We don't get so involved in a state of mind that we forget that it's just another transient state of mind, no matter how much ecstasy or agony is involved.”

— Frederick Lenz

“As you focus your attention on the heart center, you will begin to feel your thoughts slowing down. You'll begin to feel your mind becoming calm and quiet. They won't bother you.”

— Frederick Lenz

“Wisdom is seeing that there are templates in the universe that you can follow. They will show you what to do and what not to do. In order to see them you have to make your mind very quiet, very still.”

— Frederick Lenz

“Truth comes when your mind and heart are purged of all sense of striving and you are no longer trying to become somebody; it is there when the mind is very quiet, listening timelessly to everything.”

— Bruce Lee

“A primary goal of the spiritual life is to learn to quiet the mind through prayer and meditation, through spiritual practice, so that we can hear what in both Judaism and Christianity, is called the small, still voice within.”

— Marianne Williamson