Silence Is Quotes - Page 11

• This rule of silence is upheld when the culture refuses everyone easy access even to the word “patriarchy.” Most children do not learn what to call this system of institutionaliz ed gender roles, so rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence promotes denial. And how can we organize to challenge and change a system that cannot be named?

  Bell Hooks

  Children, Names, Silence

  bell hooks (2004). “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

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• Silence is the essential condition of happiness.

  Heinrich Heine

  Silence, Essentials, Conditions

  Heinrich Heine (1888). “Wit, Wisdom, and Pathos”

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• Letter 1
  To the princess of the elephants,
  I disappeared exactly one year ago. On that day I received a letter. It called me back to the place where my life with the elephants began
  Please forgive me, for the silence between us has been unbroken for one year.
  I will never be more of myself than in these letters.
  They are my maps of the bird path, and they are all that I know to be true.

  Gregory Colbert

  Princess, Years, Elephants

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• Silence is God's first language.

  John of the Cross

  Silence, Firsts, Language

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• 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. Chesterton

  Christian, Laughter, Angel

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• I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Betrayal, Silence, Neutrality

  "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam". Sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, April 30, 1967.

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• When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.

  Thomas Merton

  Prayer, Silence, World

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.106, Macmillan

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• The truth is known in silence. Be still and know.

  Leonard Jacobson

  Silence, Truth Is, Stills

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• He 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 Albom

  Mother, Night, Silence

  Mitch Albom (2009). “The Five People You Meet In Heaven”, p.85, Hachette UK

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• Silence is the best response to a fool.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Silence, Fool, Cool Status

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• To look at any thing,
  If you would know that thing,
  You must look at it long:
  To look at this green and say,
  "I have seen spring in these
  Woods," will not do - you must
  Be the thing you see:
  You must be the dark snakes of
  Stems and ferny plumes of leaves,
  You must enter in
  To the small silences between
  The leaves,
  You must take your time
  And touch the very peace
  They issue from.

  John Moffitt

  Spring, Dark, Snakes

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• Silence is not just about secrecy, Your Majesty. It is grief and it is shame.

  Melina Marchetta

  Grief, Silence, Majesty

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• At the heart of silence is prayer. At the heart of prayer is faith. At the heart of faith is life. At the heart of life is service.

  Mother Teresa

  Prayer, Heart, Helping Others

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• I am very fond of the company of ladies. I like their beauty, I like their delicacy, I like their vivacity, and I like their silence.

  Samuel Johnson

  Beauty, Silence, Delicacy

  Samuel Johnson (1836). “Johnsoniana; or supplement to Boswell; being Anecdotes and sayings of Dr. Johnson, etc”, p.405

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• Silence is a form of communication. Speech divides us.

  David Malouf

  Communication, Silence, Speech

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• Silence is the root of everything. If you spiral into its void a hundred voices will thunder messages you long to hear.

  Rumi

  Voice, Roots, Long

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• Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already

  C. S. Lewis

  Believe, Struggle, Talking

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• Say "I love you" to those you love. The eternal silence is long enough to be silent in, and that awaits us all.

  George Eliot

  Love, Long, Silence

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• To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of the weary pilgrimage.

  Samuel Johnson

  Friendship, Wise, Silence

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1859). “The Life of Samuel Johnson”, p.106

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• Silence is the deadliest weapon of mass destruction.

  Cynthia McKinney

  Mass Destruction, Silence, Weapons

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• Keep silent, because the world of silence is a vast fullness

  Rumi

  Silence, World, Silent

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• All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence... Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Silence is the invisible laying on of the Divine Pontiff's hands upon the world. Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature. It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate. Silence is the only Voice of our God.

  Herman Melville

  Fate, Hands, Voice

  "Pierre: or, The Ambiguities" by Herman Melville, (Bk. XIV, ch. 1), 1852.

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• Silence is so much more productive of wisdom and clarity in thinking.

  Ajahn Brahm

  Freedom, Thinking, Silence

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• Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think....In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think.

  Pico Iyer

  Faith, Inspiration, Thinking

  Pico Iyer (2011). “Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions”, p.546, Vintage

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• In this oasis of quiet, before the wonderful spectacle of nature, one easily experiences how profitable silence is, a good that today is ever more rare... In reality, only in silence does man succeed in hearing in the depth of his conscience the voice of God, which really makes him free. And vacations can help to rediscover and cultivate this indispensable interior dimension of human life.

  Pope John Paul II

  Faith, Inspiration, Vacation

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