Silent Quotes - Page 23

• The imaginary audience for my life is growing small and silent.

  Mason Cooley

  Growing, Aging, Life Is

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• When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.

  Mason Cooley

  Death, Fall, Tragedy

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• Truth can remain silent. Lies must be spoken.

  Mason Cooley

  Truth, Lying

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• No power on earth, however, can abolish the merciless class distinction between those who are physically desirable and the lonely, pallid, spotted, silent, unfancied majority.

  John Mortimer

  Beauty, Lonely, Class

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• The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
  Oh starry starry night! This is how
  I want to die.

  Anne Sexton

  Stars, Night, Want

  Anne Sexton, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George (2000). “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton”, p.49, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• ... women learned one important lesson--namely, that it is impossible for the best of men to understand women's feelings or the humiliation of their position. When they asked us to be silent on our question during the War, and labor for the emancipation of the slave, we did so, and gave five years to his emancipation and enfranchisement.... I was convinced, at the time, that it was the true policy. I am now equally sure that it was a blunder.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  War, Men, Years

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• I can hear those glances that you think are silent.

  Jean Racine

  Communication, Thinking, Perception

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• The proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, infuse the spirit of temperance, order, andobedience; and as its operation is silent, and only enforces the motives of morality and justice, it is in danger of being overlooked, and confounded with these other motives.

  David Hume

  Heart, Men, Order

  David Hume, John Charles Addison Gaskin (1998). “Dialogues and Natural History of Religion”, p.122, Oxford University Press, USA

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• [A distressing event] came like a door banging on to a silent room.

  Hugh Walpole

  Doors, Events, Rooms

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• Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.

  Josiah Royce

  Land, Intuition, Tools

  Josiah Royce (1913). “The Problem of Christianity: The real world and the Christian ideas”

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• The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an Orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them.

  Van Wyck Brooks

  Fun, Men, Thinking

  Van Wyck Brooks (1958). “From a writer's notebook”

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• Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent.

  Stefan Zweig

  Truth, Silence, Criminals

  Stefan Zweig, Friderike Maria Burger Winternitz Zweig, Henry G. Alsberg (1954). “Stefan and Friderike Zweig: their correspondence, 1912-1942”

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• If I stand alone, It does not mean, I am any less a Human, If my arms do not hold another, It does not mean, They are incapable of holding, If my tongue is silent, And never speaks the words of Love, It does not mean, That it will be mute, When the time comes, That the words can sincerely be spoken. And just because the World, Has not yet introduced, The one that will share my Life, It certainly does not mean, That I am incapable, Of Loving.

  Javan

  Mean, Doe, World

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• Mr. Speaker, there are some in this Chamber who believe that Christians, like well-behaved children, should be seen and not heard... Christians will not remain silent. We are here to stay.

  Tom DeLay

  Christian, Religious, Children

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• In one generation of silent neglect, we have allowed the revisionists of our history to rewrite our past and deny that we have a Christian heritage.

  Rick Scarborough

  Christian, Religious, Past

  Rick Scarborough (2008). “Enough is Enough”, p.40, Frontline

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• American Christians have been woefully silent on important issues. I am an American citizens now, and I love this country, but I see symptoms in the United States that I saw in Austria in 1938 when the Nazi Germans were terrorizing Europe.

  Maria von Trapp

  Christian, Country, Religious

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• The triumphs of a mysterious non-meeting are desolate ones; unspoken phrases, silent words.

  Anna Akhmatova

  Communication, Triumph, Phrases

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• A lot of people criticized me for speaking out, not long ago, about gay marriage. I could not remain silent any longer. It's the civil rights of our day. It's the issue of our day.

  Joe Biden

  Leadership, Gay, Rights

  "Biden dots speech with '16 themes" by Alexander Burns, www.politico.com. September 15, 2013.

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• The subject of the novel is reality liberated from soul. The reader in complete independence presented with a structured process:let him evaluate it, not the author. The façade of the novel cannot be other than stone or steel, flashing electrically or dark, but silent.

  Alfred Doblin

  Dark, Reality, Objectivity

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• It takes courage to speak up against complacency and injustice while others remain silent. But that's what leadership is.

  Rosabeth Moss Kanter

  Leadership, Justice, Community

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• I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.

  Lisel Mueller

  Sleep, Cities, America

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• Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings. Boswell described Johnson's mind when he described how he wrote, talked, ate, fidgeted and fumed. His description was, of course, incomplete, since there were notoriously some thoughts which Johnson kept carefully to himself and there must have been many dreams, daydreams and silent babblings which only Johnson could have recorded and only a James Joyce would wish him to have recorded.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Dream, Thinking, Thoughtful

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• God is silent. Everything comes out of silence.

  Mother Meera

  God, Silence

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• In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people's lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time.

  Marge Piercy

  Lying, Cat, Exercise

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• The tension to mother the "right" way can leave a peculiar silence within mother daughter relationships--the silence of a mother'sown truth and experience. Within this silence, a daughter's authentic voice can also fall silent. This is the silence of perfection. This silence of perfection prevents mothers from listening and learning from their daughters.

  Elizabeth Debold

  Daughter, Mother, Fall

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