From “The Book of Sand” (Vol. VIII).

 The deepest shared intuition is that reality is ordinarily obscured by excess. Human beings live amid continual speech, interpretation, desire, and reaction. Silence and stillness interrupt that surface movement. They suggest that what is most fundamental may not be reached by greater assertion, but by simplification, recollection, and inward quiet. In this view, they are not escapes from the world. They are ways of seeing the world more truly, by returning to that depth from which speech, movement, and thought first arise.”