The absence of noise is not in all cases the same thing as the presence of peace. Wordsworth also found morality there of one sort or another. But Damaris had never yet received any kind of impulse from either vernal or autumnal woods to teach her more of moral evil and of good than all her sages. Certainly she had found no particular impulse that way in her sages either, but that was because she was rapidly becoming incapable of recognizing a moral impulse when she saw it, the sages from Pythagoras onwards meaning something quite different from her collocation. Peace to her was not a state to be achieved but a supposed and necessary condition of her daily work, and peace, therefore, as often happend, evaded her continually. She ingeminated Peace so often and so loudly that she inevitably frightened it still farther away, peace itself being (so far as has yet been found) a loveliness only invocable by a kind of sympathetic magic and auto-hypnotism which it never occurred to her to exercise.
~Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion
Peace is a discipline sought through virtue. So often I think I expect things to give me peace (movies, books, etc.), as if it were a thing to be gifted or bought, but it is good to be reminded that true peace is is a state of active being.
