Popular quotes about Silence! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 8
The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.
Gilbert K. ChestertonBring your mind to noble silence. Unify your mind in noble silence. Concentrate your mind in noble silence... Enter into rapture and pleasure born of silence derived of concentration and awareness that is free from thought and fabrication.
Gautama BuddhaThe true Indian sets no price upon either his property or his labor. His generosity is limited only by his strength and ability. He regards it as an honor to be selected for difficult or dangerous service and would think it shameful to ask for any reward, saying rather: "Let the person I serve express his thanks according to his own bringing up and his sense of honor. Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new sweet earth, and the Great Silence alone!. What is Silence? It is the Great Mystery! The Holy Silence is His voice!
Charles Alexander EastmanIn silence one can receive more because all one's activities become concentrated at one point. There is only one real rhythm; in silence you hear it. When you live to the rhythm of this silence, you become it, slowly; everything you do, you do to it.
Mother MeeraWhat have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without? We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble - all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure! So that we don't go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak. We can't stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
Agnes de MilleInner silence is not just the absence of thoughts. No! Silence is the blossoming of our indomitable inner will. Silence is our inner wisdom-light.
Sri ChinmoySilence is not an effective political strategy, and what we do if we silence the public interest, which is so hard to hear anyway, is that we silence ourselves and then we do not have a democracy.
Jill SteinWe need to find God, and he cannot be found in noises and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature-trees, flowers, grass-grow in silence. Is not our mission to give God to those we walk with? Not a dead God, but a living, loving God. The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us. Words that don't give the light of Christ increase the darkness.
Mother TeresaI have decided to leave Cleaโs last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Lawrence DurrellThe ideal person is he who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude of the desert.
Swami Vivekananda[Speaking] is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die.
Audre LordeSilence is the great teacher and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that come from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence.
Deepak ChopraEverything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
Jane HirshfieldWhere am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
Samuel BeckettInstantly, the noise stopped. The whole room lay in perfect silence. The tire builders stood in long lines, touching each other, perfectly motionless, deafened by the silence.... For the first time in history, American mass-production workers had stopped a conveyor belt and halted the inexorable movement of factory machinery.
Ruth McKenneyThis silent call you make, A silence so loud I fear the world knows it's meaning If you fill every corner of a room Where can I look? If I close my eyes the silence becomes louder! There is no escape from you The only way out is in
Spike MilliganOur human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets...My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind.
Salman RushdieIn the silence of our hearts, God speaks of His love; with our silence, we allow Jesus to love us.
Mother TeresaThe silence before the words were spoken, is it different from the silence that came after?
Sri Nisargadatta MaharajThe voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.
James JoyceThe Simonian system can be extracted from the writings of Hippolytus. The cosmos begins with the one root, which is unfathomable Silence, pre-existent, limitless power, existing in singleness. It bestirs itself and assumes a determinate aspect by turning into Thinking (Nous, i.e. Mind), from which comes forth the Thought (Epinoia). As soon as thought is born out of the thinking silence, suddenly one has become two.
Edward F EdingerJust by being aware, thoughts start disappearing. There is no need to fight. Your awareness is enough to destroy them. And when the mind is empty, the temple is ready. And inside the temple the only god worth placing is silence. So those three words you have to remember: relaxation, thoughtlessness, silence. And if these three words are no more words to you but become experiences, your life will be transformed.
RajneeshMy sannyasins have to be creators, not through the mind but through meditation. And it comes of its own accord, one need not even think about it. So I don't teach creativity, I only teach silence. And then out of that silence much creativity comes. One is surprised oneself at how much one was carrying in one's being, unexpressed, at how great was one's potential. When one comes across it one cannot believes it!
RajneeshAs with most great communicators, God knows that the point of silence and the pause between sentences is not to give the audience the chance to fill the silence with empty babbling but to help create more depth to the conversation.
Renita J. WeemsThe purpose of laughter is to bring one to silence, and the purpose of silence is to bring one to laughter.
Sri Sri Ravi ShankarTo write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.
Maurice BlanchotAs the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden,- "Speech is silvern, Silence is golden;" or, as I might rather express it, Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
John KeatsWhen all mental activity around who you think you are or what you need for happiness is stopped, there is a crack in the authority of perception, in the structure of the mind. I invite you to enter through that crack. Come in through that opening. When you do, the mind is no longer filled with its latest self-definition. In that moment, there is only silence. And in that silence, it is possible to recognize absolute fulfilment: the truth of who you are.
GangajiThe fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
Audre LordeWhen a woman has the gift of silence she possesses a quality above the vulgar. It is a gift of Heaven seldom bestowed; without a little miracle it cannot be accomplished; and Nature suffers violence when Heaven puts a woman in the humor of observing silence.
Pierre CorneilleWhat struck me most was the silence. It was a great silence, unlike any I have encountered on Earth, so vast and deep that I began to hear my own body: my heart beating, my blood vessels pulsing, even the rustle of my muscles moving over each other seemed audible. There were more stars in the sky than I had expected. The sky was deep black, yet at the same time bright with sunlight.
Alexey LeonovSilence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.
Isabel AllendeThe mystery of the evening-star brilliant in silence and distance between the downward-surging plunge of the sun and the vast, hollow seething of inpouring night. The magnificence of the watchful morning-star, that watches between the night and the day, the gleaming clue to the two opposites.
D. H. LawrenceWhen you believe God is who he says he is, when you hang onto him and his Word in faith, his truth sets you free.6 The truth you store up in silence comes back to you in the storm, and it lifts you away as on a life raft from the fears and disappointments that would otherwise pull you under. When you abide in his Word, he abides in you.
Christine CaineWhen the man who knows all about the fruit fly chromosomes finds himself sitting next to an authority on Beowulf, there may be an uneasy silence.
Brand Blanshard... Rembrandt is not a painter at all. He is a creator, who creates his beings, three dimensional living beings, on a two-dimensional flat surface which acts as a mute, and enforces silence on them.
Sylvia Townsend WarnerAccustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.
John LahrA gift--its kind, its value and appearance; the silence or the pomp that attends it; the style in which it reaches you--may decide the dignity or vulgarity of the giver.
Johann Kaspar LavaterAre they moved by a sense of human need for silence, for reflection, for inner seeking? So they want to get away from the noise and tension of modern life, at least for a little while, in order to relax their minds and wills and seek a blessed healing sense of inner unity, reconciliation, integration?
Thomas MertonIt's going to be all right, sir," Harry said over and over again, more worried by Dumbledore's silence than he had been by his weakened voice. "We're nearly there ... I can Apparate us both back ... don't worry ..." "I am not worried, Harry," said Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water. "I am with you.
J. K. RowlingStillness empowers. Being able to detach from all external stimulants - social media, social engagements, TV, alcohol, food, etc. - and face our own silence is an enormous luxury that should not be taken for granted. The most rewarding moments in my life have stemmed from such stillness.
Romany Malcodissonance, n. Nights when I need to sleep and you can't. Days when I want to talk to you and you won't. Hours when every noise you make interferes with my silence. Weeks when there is a buzzing in the air, and we both pretend we don't here it.
David Levithan