Quiescent Quotes & Sayings

Like the practice of breath control, meditation on the forms of God, repetition of mantras, food restrictions, etc., are but aids for rendering the mind quiescent. — Ramana Maharshi

One of the grave dangers inherent in the various stages of any theatrical career-whether it be budding, quiescent or diminishing-is the advice of friends. — Moss Hart

Healing the self means committing ourselves to a wholehearted willingness to be what and how we are-beings frail and fragile, strong and passionate, neurotic and balanced, diseased and whole, partial and complete, stingy and generous, twisted and straight, storm-tossed and quiescent, bound and free. — Paula Gunn Allen

True love is quiescent, except in the nascent moments of true humility. — Bryant H. McGill

Enlightenment means that you're never the same. You move and shift as the quiescent state, in a body or out of it. And since the quiescent state is perpetual and endless ecstasy, therefore you are endless. — Frederick Lenz

Good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages its possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never gains supremacy. — Samuel Johnson

Water becomes clear and transparent when in a quiescent stage. How much the more wonderful will be the mind of a sage when poised in quiescence! It is the mirror of heaven and earth, reflecting the ten thousand things. — Zhuangzi

Great distance in either time or space has wonderful power to lull and render quiescent the human mind. — Abraham Lincoln

We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream. — Jonathan Lethem

Those of us who decided to work for democracy in Burma made our choice in the conviction that the danger of standing up for basic human rights in a repressive society was preferable to the safety of a quiescent life in servitude — Aung San

There are two antagonistic elements of society in America," Seward had proclaimed, "freedom and slavery. Freedom is in harmony with our system of government and with the spirit of the age, and is therefore passive and quiescent. Slavery is in conflict with that system, with justice, with humanity, and is therefore organized, defensive, active, and perpetually aggressive." Free labor, he said, demands universal suffrage and the widespread "diffusion of knowledge." The slave-based system, by contrast "cherishes ignorance because it is the only security for oppression. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall ... Here is something definite, something real. thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours. — Virginia Woolf

The true misfits are the ones who don't think they are.

Sometimes the concepts that ground us in quiescent certainty are the same ones that cast us into pelting hailstorms of insurmountable disbelief. — Robyn Alana Engel

I don't understand why black people have been so quiescent, so passive over the hundreds of years of American history. Why hasn't there been more violence, more armed struggle? I know answers to some of that, but it seems to me it's an issue of faith, an abiding faith in some sort of great beyond, or great spirit, or even in the American dream. — John Edgar Wideman

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. — Samuel Johnson

Waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of ... — Virginia Woolf

The world of magic is double, natural, and supernatural. Magic is impossible in a purely materialist world, a purely sceptical world, a world of pure reason. Magic depends on, it makes use of, the body, the body of desire, the libido, or life-force which Sigmund Freud said stirred the primitive cells as the sun heated the stony surface of the earth-cells which, according to him, always had the lazy, deep desire to give up striving, to return to the quiescent state from which they were roused.
-The Biographer's Tale — A.S. Byatt

We humans undergo two major growth spurts: one during infancy and another from eleven to twelve until fifteen or sixteen
pubescence. Between the two is a relatively quiescent growth period in which most of the body takes a rest from growing while the brain continues to mature. This period of life is general referred to as childhood or, sometimes, latency. — Louise J. Kaplan

A sleep without dreams, after a rough day of toil, is what we covet most; and yet
How clay shrinks back from more quiescent clay!
The very Suicide that pays his debt at once without installments
(an old way of paying debts, which creditors regret)
Lets out impatiently his rushing breath, less from disgust of life than dread of death. — Lord Byron

they can all stand quiescent in airless venues for extended periods, their eyes' expressions that unique NYC combination of Zen meditation and clinical depression, clearly unhappy but never complaining. — David Foster Wallace

Had it been possible for me to fix the plane permanently in the sky, to defy the winds and clouds and all the forces pushing it upward and pulling it earthward, I would have willingly done so. I would have stayed in my seat with my eyes closed, all strength and passion gone, my mind as quiescent as a coat rack under a forgotten hat, and I would have remained there, timeless, unmeasured, unjudged, bothering no one, suspended forever between my past and my future. — Jerzy Kosinski

Life is filled with challenges, blessing and the awareness that in life there are no guarantees. But one thing I'm sure of, is that for me, I'd rather die regretting the things I've done, then to regret the things I didn't do, but could have. So with this my new motto, I've decided to pursue what has lain quiescent in the back of my mind so now I write. — D.B. Jones

For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

The dreamer is a madman quiescent,
the madman is a dreamer in action. — Frederic Henry Hedge

There is a brief time for sex, and a long time when sex is out of place. But when it is out of place as an activity there still should be the large and quiet space in the consciousness where it lives quiescent. Old people can have a lovely quiescent sort of sex, like apples, leaving the young quite free for their sort. — D.H. Lawrence

Such emotions, sudden bursts of sexual jealousy that pursue us through life, sometimes without the smallest justification that memory or affection might provide, are like wounds, unknown and quiescent, that suddenly break out to give pain, or at least irritation, at a later season of the year, or in an unfamiliar climate. — Anthony Powell

But maybe that is not possible; maybe, in fact, the brainlessness of the box jellyfish is a direct consequence of its tremenous powers of sight. Perhaps neither the animal nor the prophet has been invented who could process so thorough a vision. It is disquieting enough to be hyperacute or hypersensitive; perhaps being both would very soon melt your brain and leave you quiescent, hanging transparently in the giant dancing green waters of the world. — Amy Leach