Jan-Willem Lubbers

silence · simplicity · solitude

Geen groter soelaas dan in je eentje bij een lamp te zitten met een opengespreid boek en bevriend te raken met iemand uit lang vervlogen tijden die je nooit hebt ontmoet.
Kenkō De kunst van het nietsdoen §13, 14

Silence is where we hear something deeper than our words. All of us know that the most essential things in life are exactly what we can't express: our relation to faith, our relation to love, our relation to death, our relation to divinity. So I think silence is the resting-place of everything essential.
In Pursuit of Silence, 23:50

"Well, said Pooh, "we keep looking for Home and not finding it, so I thought that if we looked for this Pit, we'd be sure not to find it, which would be a Good Thing, because then we might find something that we weren't looking for, which might be just what we were looking for, really."
Benjamin Hoff The Tao of Pooh, 13

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson 'Self-Reliance' in: Essays and Lectures, 263