Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the ocean is searching for you, don't walk into the river. Listen to the ocean.
Tis sweet to listen as the night winds creep From leaf to leaf.
The river taught us how to listen with a silent heart, with a waiting open soul.
A tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me!... Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.
I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer, then one asks the next question and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that, one only has to listen.
I think being open-minded about what Nature is trying to tell you is the key to being creative and successful.
Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.
The questions worth asking, in other words, come not from other people but from nature, and are for the most part delicate things easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life.
We listen too much to the telephone and too little to nature. The wind is one of my sounds. A lonely sound, perhaps, but soothing.
Life is singing also in the sand crunching under the slow and heavy steps of the guards, when we know how to listen to it.
It is the language of nature to which one has to listen.
I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.
He was taught by the river. Incessantly, he learned from it. Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion.
Sit and be still until in the time of no rain you hear beneath the dry wind's commotion in the trees the sound of flowing water among the rocks, a stream unheard before, and you are where breathing is prayer.
Kino heard the little splash of morning waves on the beach. It was very good -- Kino closed his eyes again to listen to his music.
Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?
Don't put blankets over the drum! Open completely. Let your spirit ear listen to the green dome's passionate murmur.
All of nature talks to me - if I could just figure out what it's saying - trees are swinging in the breeze. They're talking to me. Insects are rubbing their legs together. They're all talking. They're talking to me.
The words of the scholar are to be understood. The words of the master are not to be understood. They are to be listened to as one listens to the wind in the trees and the sound of the river and the song of the bird. They will awaken something within the heart that is beyond all knowledge.
