Quotes About Silence

What?" he asks the tree. "What? " The tree feels no need to reply.

The understory fills up with tracks like longhand accusations scribbled on the snow.

great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

Battered by cacophony, he grows huge. The thousand noisy tourists turn into a single organism, and then a single cell, passing millions of chemical signals a minute between its organelles. Plans blind us to the possible. Life will never end. The smallest sound, even silence, has more in it than the brain can ever grasp. Work for forever; work for no one.

all growing things alone disclose the wordless mind of God.

life is trying to say something no one hears.

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

There's a whole lot of comfort in saying nothing.

But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

I, too, had nothing to say, and I tried to say it as well as I could. What harm could so small a thing as saying nothing do to anyone?

Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they've planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But humans hear nothing.

He drove, to her direction. They followed a suite of quiet residential streets, emerging onto a commercial boulevard. They said nothing, as if they were a sunset couple taking their ten thousandth car ride together in this life. He wanted to give her the wheel, to see if she still drove like she was sailing an ice boat across a windy northern lake.

This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story.

By the age of seven, almost all of us have separated our body and our soul from our mind, and we give all of our credence to our mind, disconnected from our bodies, disconnected from our souls, which abide and grow more in silence. Descartes

That's what happens in the early stages of contemplation. We wait in silence. In silence all our usual patterns assault us. Our patterns of control, addiction, negativity, tension, anger, and fear assert themselves. That's why most people give up rather quickly. When Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, the first things that show up are wild beasts (Mark 1:13). Contemplation is not first of all consoling. It's only real.

If you can see silence as the ground of all words and the birth of all words, then you will find that when you speak, your words will be more well-chosen and calm. Francis

To keep the mind space open, we need some form of contemplative or meditation practice. This has been the most neglected in recent centuries, substituting the mere reciting and "saying" of prayers, which is not the same as a contemplative mind, and often merely confirms us in our superior or fear-based system.

Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart. —St. Francis of Assisi13

Words and complex rituals almost get in the way at this point. All you can really do is return such Presence with your own presence.

To keep the mind space open, you need some form of meditative practice—something much more than saying prayers. In fact, if recitation of prayers does not lead to a change in consciousness, it is actually counterproductive.

For some few, the split is seemingly overcome in the person of Jesus; but for more and more people, union with the divine is first experienced through the Christ: in nature, in moments of pure love, silence, inner or outer music, with animals, a sense of awe, or some kind of "Brother Sun and Sister Moon" experience. Why? Because creation itself is the first incarnation of Christ, the primary and foundational "Bible" that revealed the path to God. The

Perfect silence. This in response to Sully's key being turned in the ignition of the pickup.

At three in the morning Main Street was so quiet that Dallas could hear the street light change from red to green a block away. There was nothing sadder and lonelier in the world, he decided, especially when you were all alone when it happened.

I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.