Silence
see also Solitude
- Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.--John Lahr
- As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.--Benjamin Franklin
- Be silent, or say something better than silence.--Pythagoras
- The cruelest lies are often told in silence.--Robert Louis Stevenson ("Virginibus Puerisque")
- The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.--Marianne Moore
- Every now and then, when you're on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It's a sound you can't get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you've hit them where they live.--Shelley Winters (In Theatre Arts, June 1956)
- Her silence was worth more to her than a thousand words. In that silence, she had peace and clarity.--Cecelia Ahern
- The holiest of all holidays are those kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart.--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- I like the silence of a church, before the service begins better than any preaching.--Ralph Waldo Emerson
- If we understood the power of our thoughts, we would guard them more closely. If we understood the awesome power of our words, we would prefer silence to almost anything negative. In our thoughts and words we create our own weaknesses and our own strengths. Our limitations and joys begin in our hearts. We can always replace negative with positive.--Betty J. Eadie
- In nature we find silence – the trees, flowers, and grass grow in silence. The stars, the moon, and the sun move in silence. Silence of the heart is necessary so you can hear God everywhere—in the closing of a door, in the person who needs you, in the birds that sing, in the flowers, in the animals.-–Mother Teresa
- In ... silence we find a new energy and a real unity. God's energy becomes our, allowing us to perform things well.--Mother Teresa
- It is better to remain silent and thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt--Anonymous
- It's very important in life to know when to shut up. You should not be afraid of silence.--Alex Trebek
- Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.--George Steiner
- Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.--Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
- Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall.--Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
- Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into a prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.--Thomas Merton (Thoughts In Solitude)
- Let the waters settle and you will see the moon and the stars mirrored in your own being.--Rumi
- Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.--Dionysius the Elder
- Lying is done with words and also with silence.--Adrienne Rich
- Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself.--Harvey Fierstein
- No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.--Agnes de Mille
- Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources – it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources.--Pico Iyer (The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere)
- A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.--Anne Morrow Lindberg
- Nothing more enhances authority than silence. It is the crowning virtue of the strong, the refuge of the weak, the modesty of the proud, the pride of the humble, the prudence of the wise, and the sense of fools.--Charles de Gaulle
- Oftentimes learning happens in uncomfortable moments. That's what silence is for.--Randy Howe (from The Quotable Teacher, comp. by Howe)
- One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk.--Victoria Wolff
- Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.--Ursula K. LeGuin (A Wizard of Earthsea)
- Only in the oasis of silence can we drink deeply from the inner cup of wisdom.--Sue Patton Thoele
- A properly kept silence is a beautiful thing; it is nothing less than the father of very wise thoughts.--Diodicus
- Several times a day, stop and just listen. Open your hearing 360 degrees, as if your ears were giant radar dishes. Listen to the obvious sounds, and the subtle sounds—in your body, in the room, in the building, and outside. Listen as if you had just landed from a foreign planet and didn’t know what was making these sounds. See if you can hear all sounds as music being played just for you. Even in what is called silence there is sound. To hear such subtle sound, the mind must be very quiet.--Jan Chozen Bays (How to Train a Wild Elephant and Other Adventures in Mindfulness)
- She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.—-Neil Gaiman (Stardust)
- Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.--Myrtle Reed (Old Rose and Silver)
- Silence fertilizes the deep place where personality grows. A life with a peaceful center can weather all storms.--Norman Vincent Peale
- Silence gives us a new way of looking at something.--Mother Teresa
- Silence is a source of great strength.--Lao Tzu
- Silence is a true friend who never betrays.--Confucius
- Silence is one of the deepest disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification. One of the fruits of silence is the freedom to let God be our justifier. We don't need to straighten others out.--Richard J. Foster ("Seeking the Kingdom")
- Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.--Thomas Carlyle
- Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.--Rumi
- Silence is the mother of truth.--Benjamin Disraeli (Tancred Or, The New Crusade)
- Silence is Wisdom where Speaking is Folly.--William Penn (Some Fruits of Solitude)
- Sit quietly and listen for a voice that will say, "Be more silent." As that happens, your soul starts to revive.--Rumi
- Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation. Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.--Jean Arp
- A story is told as much by silence as by speech.--Susan Griffin
- This gathered worship, as Quakers call it, is not only absence of noise. Gathered worship springs from the reverent, silent expectation that God will come among the people. The silence deepens as we feel ourselves drawn beautifully to God and each other. Our hearts and souls burst with thanksgiving-a thanksgiving best expressed by silence. Silence growing from awe is the natural human response to hints of the Divine.--J. Brent Bill (Holy Silence: the Gift of Quaker Spirituality)
- Too many people are afraid of silence. It is as if something has to be happening all the time. But often, with silence, there is more happening. There is a reflection on what was really said to us, what was really meant by the remarks, and, yes, perhaps some passage of thought between that person and ourselves.--Kreskin (The Amazing) (in Success Secrets of Super Achievers by Stovall)
- True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.--William Penn
- Truth is violated by falsehood, but outraged by silence.--Anonymous
- Unfortunately, in seeing ourselves as we truly are, not all that we see is beautiful and attractive. This is undoubtedly part of the reason we flee silence. We do not want to be confronted with our hypocrisy, our phoniness. We see how false and fragile is the false self we project. We have to go through this painful experience to come to our true self.--M. Basil Pennington
- We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence.--Dag Hammarskjold
- We can do more work in the silence than we can by moving the lips and letting the mouth make a continuous noise. That interferes with our own thinking as well as with other people's. There is a stillness in a thinker's mind; there is a quietness in a thinker's presence, where even words are entirely unnecessary.--Robert Beesley
- We have all probably noted those sudden moments of quiet - those strange and almost miraculous moments in the life of a big city when there is a cessation of traffic noise - just an instant when there is only the sound of footsteps which serves to emphasize a sudden peace. During those seconds it is possible to notice the sunlight, to notice our fellow humans, to take breath.--Dorothy Day
- We in the "developed" world seem to have many auditory strategies that insulate us from the presence of silence, simplicity, and solitude. When I return to Western culture after time in desert, mountain or forest, I discover how we have filled our world with a multiplicity of noises, a symphony of forgetfulness that keeps our won thoughts and realizations, feelings and intuitions out of audible range.--Joan Halifax The Fruitful Darkness)
- We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature--trees, flowers, grass--grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence...we need silence to be able to touch souls.--Mother Teresa
- Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.--Ben Okri
- You are most powerful when you are most silent. People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No.-—Alison McGhee
- You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.--John Morley (Rousseau)
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