Michael Leunig Quotes

although I love a rich life, I hate an overcrowded life. I believe in rumination and lose half the beauty of all things when I am deprived of the time to ruminate.

Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and listen. No more is needed.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

I aspire only to silence.

I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words.

There is so much noise in the world! May we learn to be silent in our hearts and before God.

The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars.

Quiet time and solitude are vital to helping me keep perspective. I consider myself fortunate to have so much quiet built into my profession. I spend long hours by myself at my easel. And while I work, I think-of the future, of my loved ones, of God's goodness and the many exciting opportunities that surround me. I ponder the challenges I face, the needs of others, the direction my life is going.

Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore.

We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things....but, there are times when we must stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or in its memory. We listen, and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus.

In dwelling, be close to the land. In meditation, go deep in the heart.

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death Perhaps the world can teach us as when everything seems dead but later proves to be alive.

The beginning of prayer is silence.

Instead of indulging in jealousy, greed, in relishing themselves, there are men who keep their hearts alert to the stillness in which time rolls on and leaves us behind. ... those who are open to the wonder will not miss it. Faith is found in solicitude for faith, in an inner care for the wonder that is everywhere.

Its never too late to take a moment to look.

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.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.

True piety lies rather in the power to contemplate the universe with a quiet mind.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.

Look at this window: it is nothing but a hole in the wall, but because of it the whole room is full of light. So when the faculties are empty, the heart is full of light.

Oh to be free of myself, With nothing left to remember, To have my heart as bare As a tree in December; Resting, as a tree rests After its leaves are gone, Waiting no more for a rain at night Nor for the red at dawn.