Serenity and Inner Peace

In quiet places, reason abounds.

And if tonight my soul may find her peace

 

The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least, not to express them.

Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,

 

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.

 

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes.

 

In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon.

 

Drunk we lie down in empty hills, heaven and earth our quilt and pillow. 1

 

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.

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.

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!

A mind at peace does not engender wars.

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.

She was a girl who knew how to be happy even when she was sad. And that’s important—you know.

Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.

Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.

It would be better for me that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.

Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.

Keep cool. It will be all gone a hundred years hence.

To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

While we may not be able to control all that happens to us, we can control what happens inside us.