Quotes & Sayings About Spaciousness

I'm pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed
which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace. — Anne Lamott

His hostess was one of those women who even in an overcrowded room can create a sense of spaciousness. — Elizabeth Goudge

When we drop all of our painful effort to attain something, then suddenly there is spaciousness in our consciousness, a sense of being unobstructed, and we are able to enjoy life as it comes. — Anam Thubten

[David] Salle's earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood. — Janet Malcolm

Noah was a funeral pyre. He was burning. The flames rose to staggering heights and blazed in white, hot tongues. Jeremie had once told him a story of the burial rites of the Norse. They'd burn their dead, believing the high smoke carried their loved ones' souls to Valhalla.

Noah was beyond Valhalla. Beyond the creamy spaciousness above the clouds, beyond the limits of the very earth. He floated among the stars, joined them in holy communion, knew each one by name. Then they were within him, scores of them, bright and hot, turning his ribs into a furnace as they shifted and created constellations in his soul. And all the while, the summer sang in his lungs.

There was no space between him and Jeremie. Where one ended, the other began, and still Jeremie pulled him closer like the moon pulls the tide, gripping him tightly in the same way he'd gripped Noah's heart, had gripped his entire being. — Lily Velez

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own. — Herman Melville

Non-attachment is not the elimination of desire. It is the spaciousness to allow any quality of mind, any thought or feeling, to arise without closing around it, without eliminating the pure witness of being. It is an active receptivity to life. — Stephen Levine

I also enjoy canoeing, and I suppose you will smile when I say that I especially like it on moonlight nights. I cannot, it is true, see the moon climb up the sky behind the pines and steal softly across the heavens, making a shining path for us to follow; but I know she is there, and as I lie back among the pillows and put my hand in the water, I fancy that I feel the shimmer of her garments as she passes. Sometimes a daring little fish slips between my fingers, and often a pond-lily presses shyly against my hand. Frequently, as we emerge from the shelter of a cove or inlet, I am suddenly conscious of the spaciousness of the air about me. A luminous warmth seems to enfold me. Whether it comes from the trees which have been heated by the sun, or from the water, I can never discover. I have had the same strange sensation even in the heart of the city. I have felt it on cold, stormy days and at night. It is like the kiss of warm lips on my face. — Helen Keller

It's a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately fill up the space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness.
-Pema Chodron, from When Things Fall Apart — Pema Chodron

Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think ... All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world. — Pico Iyer

Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God's name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Nothing I could say could repel or shock her; there seemed no limit to her powers of sympathy and understanding, the generosity and spaciousness of her heart. — Oliver Sacks

The crowding of children into insufficient, often squalid spaces seems an inexplicable anomaly in the United States. Images of spaciousness and majesty, of endless plains and soaring mountains, fill our folklore and our music and the anthems that our children sing. "This land is your land," they are told; and, in one of the patriotic songs that children truly love because it summons up so well the goodness and the optimism of the nation at its best, they sing of "good" and "brotherhood" "from sea to shining sea." It is a betrayal of the best things that we value when poor children are obliged to sing these songs in storerooms and coat closets. — Jonathan Kozol

I love the leisurely amplitude, the spaciousness, of taking a walk, of heading somewhere, anywhere, on foot. I love the sheer adventure of it: setting out and taking off. — Edward Hirsch

How can love's spaciousness
be conveyed in the narrow
confines of one syllable? — Diane Ackerman

When you say "yes" to the "isness" of life, when you accept this moment as it is, you can feel a sense of spaciousness within you that is deeply peaceful. — Eckhart Tolle

The river, tonally, does not recede, presenting the same lifeless grey near and far, a depthless plane upon which Schmitt's dragging oars inscribe parallel lines and Eakins' oars, rising and falling, leave methodically spaced patches of disturbed water. The canvas is haunting - en evocation of the democracy's idyllic, isolating spaciousness, present even in the midst of a great Eastern city. — John Updike

For America today organic architecture interprets (will eventually build) this local embodiment of human freedom. This natural architecture seeks spaciousness, grace and openness; lightness and strength so completely balanced and logical that it is a new integrity ... — Frank Lloyd Wright

True listening is never self-effacement. We bring the whole self to the process, rather than denying self. When we truly listen, we aren't just waiting for someone else to decide something so we can get on with things, or so we don't have to decide for ourselves. We aren't giving away our own powers to be seen and heard. When we listen, first we listen to the parts of ourselves that are curious, in avoidance, afraid, angry, or proud. Then we can take a breath and sink, allowing those parts some space alongside the spaciousness of not knowing. — T. Thorn Coyle

Presence is a state of inner spaciousness — Eckhart Tolle

All sound arises out of Silence
and dissolves into Silence.
All thought arises out of Silence
and dissolves into Silence.
The universe arises out of Silence
and dissolves into Silence.
Suffering arises out of Silence
and dissolves into Silence.
The unbounded spaciousness of Silence,
filled with the clear light of Awareness,
dissolves the roots of pain and sorrow.
Take refuge in Silence and know
unshakable joy — Lord Dunsany

If you have ever come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees rising far above their usual height and blocking the view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches, the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your wonder at the unbroken shade in the midst of open space will create in you a sense of the divine (numen). Or, if a cave made by the deep erosion of rocks supports a mountain with its arch, a place not made by hands but hollowed out by natural causes into spaciousness, then your mind will be aroused by a feeling of religious awe (religio). We venerate the sources of mighty rivers, we build an altar where a great stream suddenly bursts forth from a hidden source, we worship hot springs, and we deem lakes sacred because of their darkness or immeasurable depth. (Seneca the Younger, Letters 41.3) — Valerie M. Warrior

Spaciousness gives rise to clarity. Clarity gives rise to inspired action. Inspired action gives rise to fulfilling manifestation. When watching the motion of the clouds in the sky each day is enough for your delight, the rest just flows in and through your life as effortlessly as those clouds. Just as day follows night, action follows rest. Do not be afraid to lie fallow until inspired action moves you. — Indigo Ocean

Being in love, however, is something we say yes to. It is a willing yielding into love's presence. It is a conscious easing of defenses. When we accept the presence of love and give ourselves to it, we glimpse immense freedom and spaciousness. There is room to move around, unencumbered by fear and doubt. Being in love is like a breath of liberation for our spirits. It awakens our passion and inspires a vitality within us that we never knew we had. Love always seeks freedom; love wants to play. — Gerald G. May

Heaven is the natural spaciousness of our mind before we make it small with self-protection. — Sakyong Mipham

Most of all we need an education which will create an educated mind. This is a mind not simply a repository of information and skills, but a mind that is a source of creative skepticism, characterized by a willingness to challenge old assumptions and to be challenged, a spaciousness of outlook, and convictions that are deeply held, but which new facts and new experiences can always modify. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Godfulness is simply recognizing the primacy of a presence of love, spaciousness, grace, generativity, caring, and creativity in the world and in myself. How can a mere financial crisis compare to that? The Generative Mystery cannot go bankrupt. It is not subject to scarcity. We never run out of God. — David Spangler

Breaking our silence is powerful. Whether it comes as a whisper or a squeak at first, allow that sense of spaciousness, of opening, allow yourself to trust the bottomlessness, and lean into the dark roar which will light up every cell.

Though it may start softly, we build in confidence and skills, we realise we do not need to wait for permission before we open our mouths. We do not need to wait for others to make space for us, we can take it. We do not need to read from others' scripts or style ourselves in weak comparison. We do not need to look to another's authority because we have our own. Down in our cores. We have waited so long for permission to know that it was our time, our turn on stage. That time is now. Our voices are being heard into being. They are needed. — Lucy H. Pearce

He will seek vainly to the right and to the left and in the newspapers for a guarantee that he has actually been amused.
For a sophisticated person, on the other hand, who is still unembarrassed enough to dare to be amused all by himself, who has enough self-confidence to know, without seeking advice from anyone else, whether he has been amused, farce will perhaps have a very special meaning, in that now with the spaciousness of abstraction and now with the presentation of a tangible actuality, it will affect his mood differently.
He will, of course refrain from bringing a fixed and definite mood with him so that everything affects him in relation to that mood. He will have perfected his mood, in that he will be able to keep himself in a condition where no particular mood is present, but where all moods are possible. — Soren Kierkegaard

Hang on to the inner body, let it be the anchor, then you're present. If they say something challenging and you lose it again, pause, and anchor again. Practice, practice, continuous practice-becaus e when you're in touch with the inner body, spaciousness arises. — Eckhart Tolle

I am looking forward enormously to getting back to the sea again, where the overstimulated psyche can recover in the presence of that infinite peace and spaciousness. — C. G. Jung

Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments. — John Updike

Tonglen practice has four stages: Rest your mind for a second or two in a state of openness or stillness. This is called flashing absolute bodhichitta, or suddenly opening to the basic spaciousness and clarity of the awakened heart. Work with texture. Breathe in a feeling of hot, dark, and heavy - a sense of claustrophobia - and breathe out a feeling of cool, bright, and light - a sense of freshness. Breathe in through all the pores of your body and radiate out completely, through all the pores of your body. Do this until your visualization feels synchronized with your in and out-breaths. Now contemplate any painful situation that's real to you. For example, you can breathe in the hot, dark, constricted feeling of sadness that you feel, and breathe out a light, cool sense of joy or space or whatever might provide relief. Widen the circle of compassion by connecting with all those who feel this kind of pain, and extending the wish to help everyone. — Pema Chodron

Many people see themselves as a problem that needs to be solved. They also habitually see the present moment as an obstacle that they need to overcome or get away from. With awareness, an inner sense of spaciousness arises that enables you to look at your own mind, which is to say the human mind, with a certain degree of detachment. — Eckhart Tolle

Patience requires a slowing down, a spaciousness, a sense of ease. — Allan Lokos

They see that who they are is the silence in which sound is happening, the spaciousness in which movement occurs. This kind of recognition, whether fleeting or abiding, is called an awakening. — Arjuna Ardagh

Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul's break for freedom. — David Whyte

Time, so majestically fine, was passing by when I asked him to stop, a while, and lay his imprint upon the spaciousness of feelings: his face, reflected in the mirror of my memories, his smile, envisaged by my eyes, in quest of his new dwellings with wells of meanings. And there, he stopped its moment... and kissed my curiosity. It was then when I felt in love with him. — Soar

Technology and production can be great benefactors of man, but they are mindless instruments, and if undirected they careen along with a momentum of their own. In our country, they pulverize everything in their path - the landscape, the natural environment, history and tradition, the amenities and civilities, the privacy and spaciousness of life, much beauty, and the fragile, slow-growing social structures that bind us together. — Charles A. Reich

One cultivates spaciousness or awareness which allows you to acknowledge the emotions and see them as part of the human condition. Emotions are like subtle thought forms and they all arise in response to something outside yourself. They are all reactions. You cultivate a quietness in yourself that watches these emotions rising and falling and passing away. — Ram Dass

My buildings don't speak in words but by means of their own spaciousness. — Thom Mayne

Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work. — May Sarton

Underneath the world of sense perceptions and the world of mind activity, there is the vastness of being. There's a vast spaciousness. There's a vast stillness and there's a little ripple activity on the surface, which isn't separate, just like the ripples are not separate from the ocean. — Eckhart Tolle

The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home ... By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits. In a world's worlding is gathered that spaciousness out of which the protective grace of the gods is granted and withheld. Even this doom of the god remaining absent is a way in which the world worlds ... All coming to presence ... keeps itself concealed to the last. — Martin Heidegger

For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

the heaven to which Jesus points is the spaciousness within ourselves - one that makes room for those who threaten us, for those who are different, even for those who have betrayed us. — Mirabai Starr

Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are, and less than we are. — Richard Rohr

In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness ... The expanses are so great that the little man hasn't the resources to orient himself ... This is what I think about Russian suicides. — Anton Chekhov

Right now you can allow yourself to experience a very simple sense of not knowing - not knowing what or who you are, not knowing what this moment is, not knowing anything. If you give yourself this gift of not knowing and you follow it, a vast spaciousness and mysterious openness dawns within you. Relaxing into not knowing is almost like surrendering into a big, comfortable chair; you just fall into a field of possibility. — Adyashanti

The spaciousness of it astounds me; this is the kind of country you dream of running away to when you are very young and innocently hungry, before you learn that all land is owned by somebody, that you can get arrested for swinging through trees in a loincloth, and that you were born either too late or too poor for everything you want to do. — Peter S. Beagle

Whatever is your present experience, you can recognize the spaciousness that allows it to be. You are this spaciousness, this awareness, this love. Deeper love and more spacious awareness is the best lesson you can get from any experience. — David Deida

Many of the gay Christians I was in conversation with were not demanding wholesale movement to a fully affirming and inclusive stance. There were those who were uncertain of such a stance even for themselves. What they did desire was space, a safe space without judgment, accusation, condemnation, assumption, and rejection. They desired a generous spaciousness to embrace authentic faith while engaging the quest for an honest, godly, and fulfilling life as a gay person. — Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter

The auto industry must acknowledge that a rational transportation policy should seek a balance between individual convenience, the efficient use of limited resources, and urban-living values that protect spaciousness, natural beauty, and human-scale mobility. — Stewart Udall

In any relationship, especially marriage, be as free of compulsive thinking as possible. In other words, the more space there is in the relationship - inner space - the more love there is because love arises out of the inner spaciousness. — Eckhart Tolle

There is a presence, a silence, a stillness which is here by itself. There is no doer of it, no creator of this stillness. It is simply here in you, with you. It is the fragrance of your own self. There is nothing to do about this, it is naturally present. This fragrance of peace, this spaciousness, it is the fragrance of your own being. — Mooji

Jesus said, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.' I think if he lived nowadays, instead of 'kingdom,' he would have said, 'dimension.' And 'heaven' refers to a sense of vastness or spaciousness. — Eckhart Tolle

But as we let go of our repetitive stories and fixed ideas about ourselves
particularly deep-seated feelings of "I'm not okay"
the armor starts to fall apart, and we open into the spaciousness of our true nature, into who we really are beyond the transitory thoughts and emotions. We see that our armor is made up of nothing more than habits and fears, and we begin to feel that we can let those go. — Pema Chodron