Serenity and Inner Peace
Rainer Maria Rilke
But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!
Jane Austen
In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquillity; and though prepared … to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free of them there.
Mark Twain
We said there warn’t no home like a raft, afterall. Other places do seem so cramped up andsmothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
Mark Twain
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.
Emily Jane Brontë
I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
William Wordsworth
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration.
Jorge Luis Borges
Patio, heaven’s watercourse. The patio is the slope down which the sky flows into the house. Serenely eternity waits at the crossway of the stars.
T. S. Eliot
Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
Frank O'Hara
My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
Henri Matisse
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter … a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The solitary speaks."One receives as a reward for much ennui , ill-humour and boredom, such as a solitude without friends, books, duties or passions must entail, one harvests those quarters of an hour of the deepest immersion in oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the most potent refreshing draught from the deepest well of his own being.
Zhuangzi
Let your mind wander in simplicity, blend your spirit with the vastness, follow along with things the way they are, and make no room for personal views - then the world will be governed.
William Wordsworth
Me this unchartered freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance desires; My hopes no more must change their name, I long for a repose that ever is the same.
