Virginia Woolf Quotes

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.

While doing work if the mind continues to be active let it be so, but there must be at the same time a capacity for silence.

An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous.

Usually when I draw, I try to be in a contemplative mood. I try to keep my mind as empty, vacant and tranquil as possible. The outer mind is like the surface of the sea. On the surface, the sea is full of waves and surges; it is all restlessness. But when we dive deep below, the same sea is all peace, calmness and quiet, and there we find the source of creativity.

The mind is running on all sides to think about many things, - what we call thoughts coming from outside. We must withdraw the mind from these distractions and make it abide in the self. Thus guarding the peace within we shall have to do the work without.

There are two things you can do with your head down - play golf and pray.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

Remember always that the ultimate value is meditation, so anything you do, do meditatively; and all things can be done in a meditative way.

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

God has blessed me with the capacity to meditate even while I am talking.

The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty.

Everywhere I go, I still have time to meditate. People think meditating is sitting there, nobody bothering you, but you can even talk and still meditate.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

When there are thoughts, it is distraction: when there are no thoughts, it is meditation.

You have to relax when you're shooting an arrow. You can't be tense. And that just helps, in your day-to-day life.

I find inspiration and rhythm in everything. Really I do. And I find inspiration in the really quiet moments.

If you take an hour out of your day to meditate, you will progress ten-fold. By staying mentally focused, you can let your worries go.

My earliest experiences in meditation were in a context of intensive retreats.

I start any work the same way. I start a rehearsal with silence.

If you know how to worry, you know how to meditate. It means to think of something over and over.

Before I found my peace, I was way too much in my head. I found myself on the field in my own thoughts. I've learned that there's a time and a place for my thoughts. The most important thing when I'm on the field is to just be in the moment and let it all go.

'Silence,' I think, was the hardest, because it's so different from everything we've done before and required very delicate handling and trying to find the right meditative pace.

I don't have to go to a mountain to meditate. I'm meditative in every moment of my life.

Meditation is about breathing, it's about clarity, taking your time and not rushing through your thinking.

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.