Popular quotes about Silence! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 88
It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to loses it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.
Edmond JabesThe tension to mother the "right" way can leave a peculiar silence within mother daughter relationships--the silence of a mother'sown truth and experience. Within this silence, a daughter's authentic voice can also fall silent. This is the silence of perfection. This silence of perfection prevents mothers from listening and learning from their daughters.
Elizabeth DeboldIn the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.
Mother TeresaWithout silence there is no music. Not simply because the faculty of hearing deteriorates from constant exposure to noise, but because silence is both the majestic frame and the stable solution for musical (and poetic) ideas. Silence is the soda water, the bracing ether, the bridge and mode of respect for receiving instructions from the angel.
Russell ShermanObjective art is just the opposite. The man has nothing to throw, he is utterly empty, absolutely clean. Out of this silence, out of this emptiness, arises love, compassion, and out of this silence a possibility for creativity. This silence, this love, this compassion, these are the qualities of meditation.
RajneeshA talkative soul lacks both the essential virtues and intimacy with God. A deeper interior life, one of gentle peace and of that silence where the Lord dwells, is quite out of the question. A soul that has never tasted the sweetness of inner silence is a restless spirit which disturbs the silence of others.
Mary Faustina KowalskaMusic and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.
Marcel MarceauYour silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them.
Luce IrigaraySilence is very important. The silence between the notes are as important as the notes themselves.
Wolfgang Amadeus MozartNot one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.
John CageI 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 DurrellYou wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.
Rodney Atkins[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 LordeInternalize the vagrant mind and fix it in the Lord. Then the meditation will be profound and intense. Don't open the eyes. Don't move from the seat. Melt yourself down into Him. Dive in the deep corners of your heart. Get immerse in the brilliant Atman. Drink the nectar of Immortality. Now enjoy the silence. Son of the nectar! Rejoice! Peace! Silence! Glory!
Sivananda...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.
Colum McCannEverything 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 HirshfieldWinter invites white; white invites silence; silence invites peace. You see, there is so much peace in walking on the snow!
Mehmet Murat IldanSilence is one of the hardest kind of arguments to refute. There is no good substitute for wisdom; but silence is the best that has yet been discovered.
Josh BillingsWhere 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 BeckettIf sound is music and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound. If the sound is effective, it should actually have a chemical - some sort of physiological - effect on the listener, so he doesn't have to hear that sound again.
Keith JarrettWhen we turn our backs on feelings we should deal with, they fester and grow and ultimately consume us. Silence is denial. Silence is anxiety.
Susan L. TaylorAs Christians try to force prayer into public schools, they often settle for a 'moment of silence.' But that supposedly innocuous 'moment of silence' is a deafening roar to a nonbeliever.
Judith HayesLet the veil of silence fall presently over what happened afterwards. Silence, too, can speak out.
Lech WalesaHe never spoke of that night again, not to your mother, not to anyone else. He was ashamed for her, for Mickey, for himself. In the hospital, he stopped speaking altogether. Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge. His thoughts still haunted him.' ~pg 139
Mitch AlbomIt does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing, one loud noise, and its gone. But the people are so cowed and disorganised. A few might take the opportunity to protest, but it'll just be a voice crying in the wilderness. Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.
Alan MooreSilence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.
Edward HoaglandPoetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.
Carl SandburgTrue, absolute silence and true, absolute love are not different. Absolute silent awareness overflows with simple, fulfilled absolute love. Objects - people, nature, emotions - may or may not appear. Objects are not needed and they are welcomed. The joy of this full silence is uncaused and unlimited. Always here, always discovering itself. It is the treasure, and it is hidden only when we refuse to keep quiet and find out who we are.
Gangaji...what I dread more than anything else in this life is noise...silence helps you to go inward..anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence.
Muriel BarberySoon 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.
Hans ArpBecause I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.
Chris KrausJust as the day cannot exist without the night, just as life cannot exist without death, creativity cannot exist without silence. And vice versa is also true: silence cannot exist without creativity.
RajneeshIn secret we met - In silence I grieve, That thy heart could forget, Thy spirit deceive. If I should meet thee After long years, How should I greet thee? - With silence and tears
Lord Byronunhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.
Jeanette WintersonThe 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 CorneilleAs I age I am grateful to find that a silence has begun to gather in me, coexisting with my tempers and my fears, unchanged by my joys or my pain. Sanctuary. Connected to the Silence everywhere.
Rachel Naomi RemenWhen your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.
Thomas MertonNow, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone.... Freedom is of the essence, because you should be able to stop and go on and follow this way or that as the freak takes you.... There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow to jar on the meditative silence of the morning.
Robert Louis StevensonHe wondered if normalcy was something, like vision or silence, you didn't realize was precious until you lost it.
Cassandra ClareI have been challenged by the concept of meditation ... I decided recently to accept the invitation of a friend to experience the sheer silence of meditation-undirected prayer. ... I had before only sensed intellectually ... But by going deep into prayer I could almost feel it.
Laurie Beth JonesWhen I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.
Wislawa SzymborskaWhen oranges came in, a curious proceeding was gone through. Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit, for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where, sucking [only I think she used some more recondite word] was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges.
Elizabeth GaskellWell, Ma, see... there's this girl." Silence. He checked to make sure the call hadn't been dropped. "You still there, Ma?" A sniffle. "You can't be crying already," he said. "I haven't told you anything about her yet." "It doesn't matter, Nick," his mother said through her tears. "Those are the three words I've been waiting thirty-four years to hear.
Julie James