Andrew Marvell Quotes

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.

My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.

I love silence.

Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.

I feel calm when I'm on my own.

The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.

Stillness as a technique is still really captivating to me.

Imagine a temple inside your mind, a haven from the chaos of the world. Visit often.

She walks--the lady of my delight-- A sheperdess of sheep. Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white; She guards them from the steep. She feeds them on the fragrant height, And folds them in for sleep.

The true creativity comes out of sitting silently. When you are so totally quiet that there is no thought, no wave in the ocean of your being, out of this silence comes a different kind of creativity.

It's like, imagine the ripples on top of an ocean. And I'm in a rowboat, reactively dealing with the waves and water coming into my boat. What I need to do is dive into the deeper solace, the calmness beneath the surface.

Attain utmost emptiness. Abide in steadfast stillness.

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

Peace does not dwell in outward things, but within the soul.

The ideal person is he who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude of the desert.

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude.

When I open my eyes to the outer world I feel myself as a drop in the sea. But when I close my eyes and look within, I see the whole universe as a bubble raised in the ocean of my heart.

Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops.

Men do not mirror themselves in running water; they mirror themselves in still water.

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.

at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.

A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.