Hesychasm

"Watchfulness is a continual fixing and halting of thought at the entrance to the heart."

"A brother asked an elder, “What is hēsychia and what good does it do?”"

""When you pray", it has been wisely said by an Orthodox writer in Finland, "you yourself must be silent... You yourself must be silent; let the prayer speak". To achieve silence: this is of all things the hardest and the most decisive in the art of prayer. Silence is not merely negative - a pause between words, a temporary cessation of speech - but, properly understood, it is highly positive: an attitude of attentive alertness, of vigilance, and above all of listening. The hesychast, the person who has attained hesychia, inner stillness or silence, is par excellence the one who listens. He listens to the voice of prayer in his own heart, and he understands that this voice is not his own but that of Another speaking within him."

"Given all the ways – both explicit and subtle – in which hesychasm is profoundly embroidered into the fabric of contemporary monasticism at the Holy Mountain, it is thus justified to conclude that not only is hesychasm Athonite, but Athos too is fundamentally hesychast."

"Through hesychasm ... different parts of the Byzantine Empire were linked with each other and to its centre. In a way, hesychasm became a cultural tradition common to Greeks, Slavs and Romanians and assumed the role of an intermediary, analogous to the role played by the Cyrillo-Methodian movement of the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries."

"Hesychasm, which is too often looked upon as a philosophico-mystical “curiosity” of purely historical interest, has its roots in Christianity as such, and ... it is not merely a rather special development of Christian spirituality, but its purest and deepest expression."