The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (TED Books)

The one thing technology doesn’t provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology.

William James, reminded us, “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

Henry David Thoreau, one of the great explorers of his time, reminded himself in his journal, “It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are.

With machines coming to seem part of our nervous systems, while increasing their speed every season, we’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off—our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, perma

“There is nothing either good or bad,” as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.

Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.

In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.

Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes—which means we’re never caught up with our lives.

did feel that spending time in silence gave everything else in my days fresh value and excitement.