Silence Quotes - Page 21

• So many of you have lost everything. I do not know what to tell you. But surely he knows what to tell you! So many of you have lost members of your family. I can only be silent; I accompany you silently, with my heart...

  Pope Francis

  Heart, Doe, Lost Everything

  Pope Francis' Homily at Mass in Tacloban City, w2.vatican.va. January 17, 2015.

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• Come into the silence of solitude, and the vibration there will talk to you through the voice of God.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Voice, Meditation, Solitude

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• Reading requires a loner's temperament, a high tolerance for silence, and an unhealthy preference for the company of people who are imaginary or dead.

  David Samuels

  Reading, People, Tolerance

  David Samuels (2008). “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”

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• But let me have silence always, in the centre of the shouting—that is essential! Let me have silence so that no pin may drop and not be heard, and not a whisper escape us for all our spouting, nor the needle's scratching upon this gramophone of a circular cosmic spot. Hear me! Mark me! Learn me! Throw the mind's ear open—shut up the mind's eye—all will be music!

  Wyndham Lewis

  Eye, Mind, Essentials

  Wyndham Lewis (1979). “Wyndham Lewis, Collected Poems and Plays”, New York : Persea Books

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• What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Dream, Pain, Healing

  "The Powerbook". Book by Jeanette Winterson, 2000.

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• In the silence, hear what can't be heard.

  Ben Lee

  Heard

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• He who has heard the Word of God can bear his silences.

  Ignatius of Loyola

  Bears, Heard, Word Of God

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• There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

  Toni Morrison

  Writing, Self, Civilization

  "In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent" by Toni Morrison, www.thenation.com. March 23, 2013.

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• Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.

  Joseph Conrad

  Home, Heart, Reality

  Joseph Conrad, Robert Kimbrough (1963). “Heart of darkness: an authoritative text, backgrounds and sources, ess ays in criticism”

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• Privilege does not operate without silence.

  Junot Diaz

  Doe, Privilege

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• Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence.

  Thomas Merton

  Giving, Perspective, Together

  Thomas Merton (1979). “Love and Living”, p.49, Macmillan

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• Beauty can only be best described at its origin through a befuddling silence, the kind that leaves one almost on the verge of a pleasurable death, just because one chooses beauty over life. There is nothing in this world to hold something so pure, so divine except a loving heart. And it is the only manner through which love recognises love; the language of love has no alphabet, no words.

  Faraaz Kazi

  Heart, Language Of Love, World

  Faraaz Kazi (2012). “Truly, Madly, Deeply!: Memoirs of a Broken Heart's First Love!”, p.38, Faraaz Kazi

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• I've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech-if not all human speech-is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder-they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.

  Li-Young Lee

  Thinking, Oxygen, Blood

  "The Totality of Causes". Interview with Tina Chang, www.poets.org. February 21, 2014.

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• The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one's clothes in a community of blind men.

  Joseph Conrad

  Believe, Heart, Fate

  Joseph Conrad (2015). “The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad”, p.89, Cambridge University Press

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• True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

  F. H. Bradley

  Men, Would Be, Penitence

  "Aphorisms". Book by F. H. Bradley (Aphorism No. 10), 1930.

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• Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.

  Mark Helprin

  Stars, Dark, Light

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