Silence Quotes - Page 26

• Do not speak unless you can improve on silence, said a Buddhist sage.

  Tim Ward

  Buddhist, Speaking Spanish, Sage

  Tim Ward (2013). “What the Buddha Never Taught: A 'Behind the Robes" Account of Life in a Thai Forest Monastery”, p.73, Changemakers Books

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• What discord we should bring into the universe if our prayers were all answered. Then we should govern the world and not God. And do you think we should govern it better? It gives me only pain when I hear the long, wearisome petitions of people asking for they know not what. . . . Thanks-giving with a full heart-and the rest silence and submission to the divine will!

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Prayer, Pain, Heart

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1888). “Longfellow's Days: The Longfellow Prose Birthday Book : Extracts from the Journals and Letters of H. W. Longfellow”

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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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• 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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• The primary virtue is: hold your tongue; who knows how to keep quiet is close to God.

  Cato the Younger

  Tongue, Quiet, Virtue

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• Speech may be silver but silence is golden. Traders with the golden touch do not talk about their success.

  Linda Bradford Raschke

  May, Speech, Golden

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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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• You will never be an inwardly religious and devout man unless you pass over in silence the shortcomings of your fellow men, and diligently examine your own weaknesses.

  Thomas a Kempis

  Religious, Men, Weakness

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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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• Silence is an ornament for women.

  Sophocles

  Ornaments, Silence Is

  Sophocles (1963). “Sophocles, Ajax”

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• Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are.

  Anna Quindlen

  Sex, Grief, Funeral

  Anna Quindlen (2004). “Loud and Clear”, p.157, Random House

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• The mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Differences, Community, Solitude

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1954). “Life Togehter”

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• By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.

  Octavio Paz

  Two, Knowing, Publicity

  Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.96, Arcade Publishing

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• A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf... For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Dust, Two, Drawing

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• Many a time the thing left silent makes for happiness.

  Pindar

  Silent, Left

  Pindar (1959). “The odes of Pindar”

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• When thou art quiet and silent, then art thou as God was before nature and creature; thou art that which God then wats; thou art that whereof he made thy nature and creature: Then thou hearest and seest even with that wherewith God himself saw and heard in thee, before every thine own willing or thine own seeing began.

  Jakob Bohme

  Art, Saws, Quiet

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• A man seeking publicity works with the noise of voice; A man working for humanity seeks the silence of rejoice in life.

  Anuj

  Men, Voice, Humanity

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• He was sure that he was not the cause of the abrupt silence. His passage through the canyon had not previously disturbed either birds or cicadas. Something was out there. An intruder of which the ordinary forest creatures clearly did not approve. He took a deep breath and held it again, straining to hear the slightest movement in the woods. This time he detected the rustle of brush, a snapping twig, the soft crunch of dry leaves-and the unnervingly peculiar, heavy, ragged breathing of something big.

  Dean Koontz

  Breathing, Bird, Forests

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• The highest level of prayer is not a prayer for anything. It is a deep and profound silence, in which we allow ourselves to be still and know Him. In that silence, we are changed. We are calmed. We are illumined. Prayer is meant to dissolve the worldly focus, to dissolve our sense of a separate self, to help us detach from an insane world order. We pray that He might flood our minds. Prayer is like pouring hot water on an ice cube, melting the cold and encrusted thought forms that still surround our hearts.

  Marianne Williamson

  Prayer, Heart, Order

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