Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

The heart beats louder and the soul hears quicker in silence and solitude.

You grow your best thoughts in silence, solitude, and meditation. When you relax and think deeply, you are giving your inmost powers their best opportunity to disclose themselves.

Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.

But for me I think it's just about taking that time of reflection and contemplation. That's probably my process in every decision that I make: to make sure that I spend time just with myself, and really times of silence and mediation to go through that process; and music is a big part of that as well.

Let us leave a little room for reflection in our lives, room too for silence. Let us look within ourselves and see whether there is some delightful hidden place inside where we can be free of noise and argument. Let us hear the Word of God in stillness and perhaps we will then come to understand it.

Cultivating quietness is a missing discipline today...the quietness needed to nurture an inner life hid in Christ.

Meditation is waiting on God.

He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.

It is important from time to time to slow down, to go away by yourself, and simply be.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Our souls need time to think, dream, and reflect.

I aspire only to silence.

There's a difference between solitude and loneliness. I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while.

I think I'm a spiritual person. I don't really go to church often when services are on, but I like going in when they are empty and quiet, and just sitting there and thinking for a little while.

I personally think that's incredibly therapeutic to just be alone in your own thoughts and not be freaking out.

Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing.

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.

All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone - and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment.

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.

Sit with silence a lot - real silence, where nothing is happening - because you learn so much in those moments of quiet.

I like to read a lot, man. I read a lot and meditate and just go to that place. I'm not really an outdoorsman. I don't watch TV.

My hobby is silence.

In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth... Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected... For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of 'eco-system' that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.

To develop our real selves, we need time alone for thought and meditation. To be always giving out and never pumping in, the well runs dry.