Serenity and Inner Peace

I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future.

I am content in my later years. I have kept my good humor and take neither myself nor the next person seriously.

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.

It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

Though I am always in haste, I am never in a hurry.

Let nothing trouble you, nothing frighten you. All things are passing; God never changes. Patient endurance attains all things. Whoever possesses God lacks nothing: God alone suffices.

How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!

A paradise within thee, happier far.

Come, pensive nun, devout and pure,

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.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death.

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Über allen Gipfeln

Shantih, shantih, shantih.

Teach us to care and not to care

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

A mind at peace with all below,

Lucid intervals and happy pauses.

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.

In the deserts of the heart

Peace is its own reward.

Every one of us must find his peace from within. And peace, to be real, must be unaffected by outside circumstance.