Master Hsieh, as quoted in Road to Heaven by Bill Porter:

Lao-tzu said to cultivate tranquillity and detachment. To be natural. To be natural means not to force things. When you act natural, you get what you need. But to know what’s natural, you have to cultivate tranquillity. Huashan has long been famous as a center of Taoism because it’s quiet. There used to be a lot of hermits here But now the mountain has been developed for tourism. The tranquility is gone, and so are the hermits.

In a recent essay, Bob Turner (local Presbyterian pastor) quotes Gordon Hempton (acoustic ecologist) on the difference between silence and quiet:

Real quiet is not the absence of sound [which is the definition of silence] but the absence of noise.