Silence Quotes - Page 31

• 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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• Perseverance can lend the appearance of dignity and grandeur to many actions, just as silence in company affords wisdom and apparent intelligence to a stupid person.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Perseverance, Stupid, Action

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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 sorrow's best food.

  James Russell Lowell

  Sorrow, Best Food, Silence Is

  James Russell Lowell (1898). “Poems of James Russell Lowell With Biographical Sketch by Nathan Haskell Dole”, p.438, Library of Alexandria

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• An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile.

  James Joyce

  Humor, Three, Needs

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• There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Pain, Doubt, Sorrow

  Elizabeth Bowen (1938). “The death of the heart”, Viking Pr

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• The stillest tongue can be the truest friend.

  Euripides

  Tongue, Truest

  Euripides (1942). “Euripides”

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• Silence is an ornament for women.

  Sophocles

  Ornaments, Silence Is

  Sophocles (1963). “Sophocles, Ajax”

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• The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

  George Steiner

  Broken, Society, Graffiti

  George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.432, Oxford University Press on Demand

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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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• I couldn't imagine a day without music. It relaxes and stimulates me in equal measure and I hate the sound of silence - the concept, I mean, not the track by Simon and Garfunkel.

  Charles Kennedy

  Hate, Mean, Track

  "Charles Kennedy" by Will Hodgkinson, www.theguardian.com. April 14, 2005.

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• In the bad sixties, when drugs came into widespread use among adolescents and when Scarsdale mothers developed the habit of not asking about each others children for fear of what they'd hear, one knew that they were speaking-or not speaking, keeping their unhappy silence-on behalf of stricken motherhood everywhere in the country.

  Diana Trilling

  Mother, Country, Children

  Diana Trilling (1981). “Mrs. Harris: the death of the Scarsdale diet doctor”, Harcourt

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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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• We have kept our children so busy with "useful" and "improving" activities that we are in danger of raising a generation of young people who are terrified of silence, of being alone with their own thoughts.

  Eda LeShan

  Children, People, Generations

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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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• In Maine we have a saying that there's no point in speaking unless you can improve on silence.

  Edmund Muskie

  Communication, Maine, No Point

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• I got quite bored, serving in the bar. Since I was there, the customers wouldn't talk about women, and with half their subject matter denied them, it was: horses, silence; horses, silence.

  Bernadette Devlin

  Horse, Bored, Bars

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• Born in elevators and supermarkets, Muzak has spread to restaurants, hotels, airplanes, telephone hold services, and waiting rooms. The public-relations experts believe that human beings fear silence - that is, the absence of constantly imposed direction. It is further believed that if we can be relieved of our fears, we will gain enough self-confidence to buy, eat, vote, fly, or simply go on living.

  John Ralston Saul

  Believe, Airplane, Self Confidence

  John Ralston Saul (2002). “The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense”, p.211, Simon and Schuster

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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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• The most effective comeback to an insult is silence.

  Russell Lynes

  Wise, Comeback, Insult

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• If something controls you in a way that puzzles you, think of it as a mystery. Mysteries are best approached by closing your eyes and mouth to experience darkness and silence. I find new and healing images in that dark, silent place away from emotions that control me. Do not be afraid to close your eyes and be silent in prayer, meditation, rest or sleep. In those states you may rediscover a new self. Then your life, time and thoughts will become yours again and you can live your unique myth.

  Bernie Siegel

  Prayer, Sleep, Eye

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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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• 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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