··· Tags pointing to: listen ···

Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.

— Native American proverb  <link>

To find something that is given, one must first be looking for it. To understand an answer, one must first have asked the question, otherwise the explanation will sound like a foreign tongue, or like empty silence.

— Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. 1.  <link>

The heart wants to hear, see, and know.

The human heart seeks to engage especially in three activities. It wants to hear and be heard, it wants to see and be seen, and it wants to know and be known.

— Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. 1.  <link>

Only a heart, only a soul, only one who loves hears.

— Danusha Goska, Save Send Delete  <link>

Silence is not the absence of sound; it is the freedom to listen to God.

— Author unknown  <link>

No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied—it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.

— Ansel Adams  <link>

The journey into the inner self is not just the important one, it is the only one. We need to listen to the sound beyond the silence.

— William Butler Yeats  <link>

There is no need to create silence
     for it is already there.
It is simply a matter of letting it rise up
     from within us.
Once we have heard this silence
     we thirst to find it again.

— A Carthusian, The Wound of Love  <link>

What was in that candle’s light
     that opened and consumed me so quickly?
Come back, my friend.
The form of our love is not a created form.
Nothing can help me but that beauty.
There was a dawn I remember when my soul
     heard something from your soul.
I drank water from your spring,
     and felt the current take me.

— Rumi  <link>

While walking through the forest, you notice the quiet. But when you stop and listen for ten minutes, you suddenly realize it is not so quiet. (Ever notice that the longer you look at stars, the more stars you see?) There are many noises that even your quiet walking disguises. I wonder if this is like prayer…

In our prayer, how often are we paying attention? Just like in the forest, maybe a true silence will help us hear what God is trying to tell us—if we would only listen! He is speaking, but we are too busy with our distractions and often don’t even know it.

— J. Curley [via]  <link>

Silence and Speech

There are two great forces in the universe, silence and speech. Silence prepares, speech creates. Silence acts, speech gives the impulse to action. Silence compels, speech persuades. The immense and inscrutable processes of the world all perfect themselves within, in a deep and august silence, covered by a noisy and misleading surface of sound—the stir of innumerable waves above, the fathomless resistless mass of the ocean’s waters below. Men see the waves, they hear the rumour and the thousand voices and by these they judge the course of the future and the heart of God’s intention; but in nine cases out of ten they misjudge. Therefore it is said that in History it is always the unexpected that happens. But it would not be the unexpected if men could turn their eyes from superficies and look into substance, if they accustomed themselves to put aside appearances and penetrate beyond them to the secret and disguised reality, if they ceased listening to the noise of life and listened rather to its silence.

— Sri Aurobindo, “The Strength of Stillness”, Karmayogin, 1910  <link>