Stillness: Ideas for rest and attention.

Editor’s note

Stillness

For moments when you want to slow down, reflect or pay attention.

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The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

The saying comes from chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching, the classic of Taoist philosophy traditionally credited to the sage Laozi; its oldest surviving copies date from around 300 BC. Literally, a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet; the li is a Chinese measure of distance, today half a kilometre. The same chapter notes that a tree too thick to hug grows from a tiny shoot: great things start small, and are best dealt with while they are still small.

Chinese, Daoist ProverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

The wound is where the light enters you.

The sentence condenses lines by Coleman Barks, the American poet whose free versions made Rumi a bestseller in English; Barks did not read Persian and reworked scholarly translations. His poem “Childhood Friends” (1990) urges the reader to keep looking at “the bandaged place”, where the light enters. It draws on the Masnavi of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic of Konya, who tells the wounded not to turn away from the plaster a spiritual guide lays on them: the healing comes from its light, not from themselves.

Attributed to Rumi; exact English sentence not matched to a standard textRead card

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The tongue has no bones, but it can break hearts.

The older form of this proverb says the tongue has no bones, yet it breaks bones: words can hurt as much as blows. An Italian-English dictionary of 1760 gives it as “La lingua non ha osso, e osso fa rompere”; Greek has it too, and the Ottoman statesman and scholar Ahmed Vefik Pasha recorded “Dilin kemiği yok, kemiği kırar” in his 19th-century collection of Turkish proverbs. Swahili says simply “Ulimi hauna mfupa”, the tongue has no bone. The ending about hearts seems to be a later English variant.

Persian, Turkish, Arabic variants ProverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

The rose's lover must endure the thorn.

The Turkish Language Association's dictionary explains that people put up with the troubles that come with someone, or some work, they love. The rose and its thorn are an old pair in Turkish and Persian poetry; in classical Ottoman verse the nightingale longs for the rose, and the thorn often stands for the pain of love. English has “No rose without a thorn”, as does Turkish, “Dikensiz gül olmaz”, but this proverb adds that whoever loves the rose accepts its thorn.

Turkish, Persian variants ProverbRead card

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He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.

English quotation books have called this an “Arabian proverb” since at least the 1860s; Tryon Edwards's A Dictionary of Thoughts (1891) is one, but these books give no Arabic original, so the label is best taken loosely. The idea is widely shared: good health gives people the strength to plan and to recover from setbacks. Turkish says “Her şeyin başı sağlık”, health comes first, and when a glass breaks people say “Sağlık olsun”: never mind, as long as everyone is well.

Spanish, Arabic variants ProverbRead card

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A single bracelet does not jingle.

The proverb is usually labelled Congolese, though the books that cite it do not say which of the region's many languages it comes from; Charlotte and Wolf Leslau's collection African Proverbs (1962) lists it with no origin. The image is simple: one bangle on a wrist makes no sound, and the jingle comes only when it meets another. It is a saying about working together. American books on Kwanzaa, the African-American festival held from 26 December to 1 January, use it to illustrate umoja, Swahili for unity.

Proverb attributed to the CongoRead card

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Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

The pairing is usually called a Japanese proverb, but no Japanese original has been found. It appears in English-language business books from the mid-1990s; “vision” here means a clear idea of where you want to get to. An older saying on the same theme was already in church papers in the 1920s: “A vision without a task is but a dream; a task without a vision is drudgery.” It is often said to come from an 18th-century English church inscription, but that is unconfirmed too.

Anonymous saying; widely circulated as a Japanese proverb, with no specific Japanese source identifiedRead card

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Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for life.

Often called an ancient Chinese proverb, the saying has no known Chinese source. Its earliest known version is in Mrs Dymond (1885), a novel by Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray: give a man a fish and he is hungry again in an hour; teach him to catch one and you do him a good turn. “Feed him for a lifetime” appears by 1961. The idea is older: the 12th-century Jewish scholar Maimonides ranked highest the help that lets a poor person support himself.

Chinese, widely attributed ProverbRead card

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Better to light one candle than curse the darkness.

The saying is often called Chinese or credited to Confucius, but its earliest known version is English. In a sermon published in 1907, the Methodist preacher William L. Watkinson warned that angry speeches against evil come easier than good works: it is better to light the candle than to curse the darkness. That year the sermon was reprinted in China's Millions, a missionary magazine, perhaps explaining the Chinese label. The Christophers, a Catholic movement, took it as their motto, and in 1962 Adlai Stevenson used it to praise Eleanor Roosevelt.

Anonymous saying; earliest documented close form located in William L. Watkinson (1907)Read card

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A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.

John Barrymore (1882–1942), nicknamed “the Great Profile”, was one of the most celebrated American actors of his day: his Hamlet on Broadway in 1922 and in London in 1925 led critics to call him the greatest living American tragedian, and he later starred in films such as Grand Hotel (1932). The line comes from Good Night, Sweet Prince, the biography his friend Gene Fowler wrote after his death, where it is introduced with “Barrymore once said”. Fowler took the title from Horatio's farewell to the dying Hamlet.

Attributed to John Barrymore; reported by Gene Fowler in Good Night, Sweet Prince (1943)Read card

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While there is life, there is hope.

The Roman statesman Cicero quotes this as a common saying in a letter to his friend Atticus in 49 BC, during the civil war between Caesar and Pompey: as people say of a sick man, while there is breath there is hope, and so, as long as Pompey was in Italy, he had not given up. The shorter Latin Dum spiro, spero, “while I breathe, I hope”, is of unknown origin; it is the motto of South Carolina and of St Andrews in Scotland.

Latin, Roman ProverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

I've fallen in love, or imagine that I have. I went to a party and lost my head. I bought a horse, which I don't need at all.

Leo Tolstoy wrote this in his diary in Moscow on 25 January 1851, when he was 22 and still years away from War and Peace. Eight days earlier, on 17 January, he had set out his money troubles in the same diary: overdue promissory notes, no cash, plans to sell a horse and even to pawn his watch. In the 25 January entry, after the unnecessary purchase, he set himself two rules: do not offer a price for a thing you do not need, and on arriving at a ball, ask someone to dance at once. Tolstoy began keeping a diary at 18 and kept it, with gaps, until his death in 1910, using it to watch himself and to set rules he often broke. Before his wedding in 1862 he gave his diaries to his fiancée, Sophia Behrs, to read.

Leo Tolstoy, from his diariesRead card

StillnessLiterature

In every religion there is love, yet love has no religion.

This sentence has not been found in Rumi's writings, but it echoes a story in his Masnavi, the long Persian poem he dictated in Konya. Moses hears a shepherd offering, in homely words, to mend God's shoes, comb his hair and bring him milk. Moses scolds him, and God rebukes Moses: he was sent to bring people closer, not to drive them away. God's answer includes the line “The religion of love is apart from all religions.” When Rumi died in 1273, Christians and Jews joined his mourners.

Rumi (popular attribution)Read card

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A crooked tree lives its own life, but a straight tree is turned into wood.

No Chinese original of this wording has been traced; the idea comes from the Zhuangzi, a classic of Chinese philosophy from the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. In one story a carpenter walks past a giant oak by a village shrine without a glance, because its timber is useless. That night the tree appears in his dream: being useless, it says, has kept it alive. Another chapter says it plainly: “The straight tree is felled first.” Turkish has a similar saying: people throw stones at the tree that bears fruit.

Chinese proverbRead card

StillnessLiterature

Sometimes a man must fight so hard for life that he doesn't have time to live it.

The line is shared widely under Bukowski's name, but no poem, novel or letter containing it has been found. Born in Germany in 1920 and raised in Los Angeles, he spent more than a decade as a filing clerk at the city's post office. In 1969 his publisher, John Martin, offered him financial support to write full time. Bukowski wrote that he could stay and go crazy, or leave and starve: “I have decided to starve.” Within a month he had finished his first novel, Post Office.

Charles Bukowski (attributed)Read card

StillnessLiterature

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.

The line circulates widely under Bukowski's name, but no poem, story or letter containing it has been identified. Its logic is a paradox: the part of you that notices the loss is the part still intact. Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) wrote about people worn down by dull jobs, drink and poverty, and Time magazine called him a “laureate of American lowlife”. His gravestone reads “Don't Try”. In a 1963 letter he explained that a writer should not strain for Cadillacs, creation or immortality, but wait for the work to come.

Charles Bukowski (attributed)Read card

StillnessLiterature

Do not waste your life trying to solve the sky. No one came back with the answer. Sit, breathe, and taste this hour.

A modern verse inspired by the Rubáiyát, not a translation of Omar Khayyam. Khayyam (1048–1131) was a Persian mathematician and astronomer from Nishapur who led the team behind the Jalali calendar, the basis of Iran's calendar today. Four-line poems, rubáiyát, were credited to him after his death, and how many are really his is still debated. The verse echoes Edward FitzGerald's famous English version: of all who passed through “the door of Darkness”, “Not one returns to tell us of the Road”.