Silence Quotes - Page 25

• Libraries' most powerful asset is the conversation they provide - between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence.

  Bella Bathurst

  Children, Powerful, Book

  "The secret life of libraries" by Bella Bathurst, www.theguardian.com. April 30, 2011.

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• Noise: a stench in the ear.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Ears, Noise

  Ambrose Bierce (2011). “Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs”, p.732, Library of America

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• The only master that exists, the only one that's true and believable is your own conscience. To find it you have to stand in silence-alone and in silence-you have to stand on the naked earth, naked yourself and with nothing around you, as if you were already dead. You don't hear anything at first; the only thing you feel is terror, but then you begin to hear a voice, away in the background, far off; it's a calm voice, and maybe its banality gets on your nerves to begin with.

  Susanna Tamaro

  Voice, Naked, Nerves

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• Among friends one has the privilege of saying nothing; the civility consists in the assumption that one's silence will be civilly understood. I can imagine a small gathering of friends who say nothing all evening: they recoil from saying anything that the others don't want to hear; and their silence would be the subtlest courtesy.

  Allen Tate

  Friendship, Gathering, Would Be

  Allen Tate (1967). “T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work”, London : Chatto & Windus

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• I lay my tasks down one by one; I sit in the silence of twilight grace. Out of the shadows, deep and dun, Steals, like a star, my Baby's face. .... I will take up my work once more, As if I had never laid it down. Who will dream that I ever wore, In triumph, motherhood's sacred crown? .... Nevertheless, the way is long, And tears leap up in the light of the sun. I'd give my world for a cradle-song, And a kiss from Baby?only one.

  Mary C. Ames

  Dream, Song, Baby

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• Come to me in the silence of the night,
  Come to me in the speaking silence of a dream.
  Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright as sunlight on a stream.
  Come back in tears,
  O memory, hope, love of finished years.

  Christina Rossetti

  Dream, Memories, Eye

  'Echo'

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• Now on the hills I hear the thunder mutter... Nearer and nearer rolls the thunder-clap, - You can hear the quick heart of the tempest beat.... Look! look! that livid flash! And instantly follows the rattling thunder, As if some cloud-crag, split asunder, Fell, splintering with a ruinous crash, On the Earth, which crouches in silence under; And now a solid gray wall of rain Shuts off the landscape, mile by mile.

  James Russell Lowell

  Wall, Rain, Heart

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• Again, now, now, again Plashes the rain in heavy gouts, The crinkled lightning Seems ever brightening... And loud and long Again the thunder shouts His battle-song, - One quivering flash, One wildering crash, Followed by silence dead and dull, As if the cloud, let go, Leapt bodily below To whelm the earth in one mad overthrow, And then a total lull.

  James Russell Lowell

  Letting Go, Song, Rain

  James Russell Lowell (1876). “The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell”, p.7

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• After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Reality, Despair, Answers

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• And to think, there are still places in the world where man has not been, where he has left no footprints, where the mysteries stand secure, untouched by human eyes. I want to go to these places, the quiet, timeless, ageless places, and sit, letting silence and solitude be my teachers.

  Evan Tanner

  Teacher, Eye, Men

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• The hush comes with the deepening of Autumn; but it comes gradually. Our ears are attuned to it, day by quieter day. But even now, if one awakens in the deep darkness of the small hours, one can hear it, a foretaste of Winter silence. It’s a little painful now, and a little lonely because it is so strange.

  Hal Borland

  Lonely, Autumn, Winter

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• Ah, how wonderful is the advent of the Spring!—the great annual miracle.... which no force can stay, no violence restrain, like love, that wins its way and cannot be withstood by any human power, because itself is divine power. If Spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation would there be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change!... We are like children who are astonished and delighted only by the second-hand of the clock, not by the hour-hand.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Children, Spring, Heart

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• When you cannot hold the body still, you cannot hold the brain still. If you do not know the silence of the body, you cannot understand the silence of the mind. Action and silence have to go together. If there is action, there must also be silence. If there is silence, there can be conscious action and not just motion.

  B.K.S. Iyengar

  Brain, Mind, Together

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• Through the portals of silence the healing sun of wisdom and peace will shine upon you.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Healing, Shining, Sun

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• Let him who believes in immortality enjoy his happiness in silence; he has no reason to give himself airs about it.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Believe, Air, Giving

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann (2014). “Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann”, p.82, Ravenio Books

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• Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought.

  Victor Hugo

  Writing, Play, Tyrants

  "Les misérables".

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• The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.

  Gloria Steinem

  Men, Expectations, Female

  Gloria Steinem (2012). “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”, p.281, Open Road Media

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• In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Acting, Together

  Thomas Carlyle, G. B. Tennyson (1984). “Carlyle Reader”, p.276, CUP Archive

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• The Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth.

  Donald C. Peattie

  Book, Rocks, Hands

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• [W]hen the mind is really absent, in that silence, in that unlimited space, your potential starts glowing, radiating, flowering. Suddenly you are full of cherry blossoms, a new presence, a new fragrance.

  Rajneesh

  Glowing, Space, Meditation

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• Start with meditation, and things will go on growing in you—silence, serenity, blissfulness, sensitivity. And whatever comes out of meditation, try to bring it out in life. Share it, because everything shared grows fast.

  Rajneesh

  Meditation, Serenity, Trying

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• All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows.

  Wendell Berry

  Pride, Men, Rivers

  Wendell Berry (2009). “The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry”, p.29, Counterpoint Press

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• While doing the postures, your mind should be in half-consciousn ess, which does not mean sleep. It means silence, emptiness, space, which can then be filled with an acute awareness of the sensations given by the posture. You watch yourself from inside. It is a full silence.

  B.K.S. Iyengar

  Mean, Sleep, Space

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• Advent is a time of waiting, of expectation, of silence. Waiting for our Lord to be born. A pregnant woman is so happy, so content. She lives in such a garment of silence, and it is as though she were listening to hear the stir of life within her. One always hears that stirring compared to the rustling of a bird in the hand. But the intentness which which one awaits such stirring is like nothing so much as a blanket of silence.

  Dorothy Day

  Hands, Expectations, Bird

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• Whom the heart of man shuts out, Sometimes the heart of God takes in, And fences them all round about With silence mid the worlds loud din.

  James Russell Lowell

  Loneliness, Heart, Men

  James Russell Lowell (1871). “The poetical works of James Russell Lowell”, p.16

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