Salvation lies in imitating Christ, in other words, in imitating the 'withdrawal relationship' that links him with his Father... To listen to the Father's silence is to abandon oneself to his withdrawal, to conform to it.
Distraction is our habitual state. Not the distraction of the person who withdraws from the world in order to shut himself up in the secret and ever-changing land of his fantasy, but the distraction of the person who is always outside himself, lost in the trivial, senseless, turmoil of everyday life.
When things were very bad his soul just crawled behind his heart and curled up and went to sleep
When you’re hurting deeply, you go inward.
By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.
And if, happy in the lot of no created thing, he withdraws into the center of his own unity, his spirit, made one with God, in the solitary darkness of God, who is set above all things, shall surpass them all.
It is not easy to make our lives respectable by any course of activity. We must repeatedly withdraw into our shells of thought, like the tortoise, somewhat helplessly; yet there is more than philosophy in that.
If you withdraw into yourself, you run the risk of becoming egocentric. And stagnant water becomes putrid.
The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.
Music draws me in. As soon as I hear it, I'm there. I'm stuck in it.
