Quotes About Silence

He had thought that to pray was to talk; he learned that to pray is not only to keep silent, but to listen. And that is how it is: to pray is not to listen to oneself speak, but is to come to keep silent, and to continue keeping silent, to wait, until the person who prays hears God.

Precisely because a human being has the ability to speak, for this very reason the ability to keep silent is an art; and precisely because this advantage of his tempts him so easily, the ability to keep silent is a great art.

The bird keeps silent and waits: it knows, or rather it fully and firmly believes, that everything takes place at its appointed time. Therefore the bird waits, but it knows that it is not granted to it to know the hour or the day; therefore it keeps silent. Then, when the moment comes, the silent bird understands that this is the moment; it makes use of it and is never put to shame.

Silence is the snare of the demon, and the more one keeps silent, the more terrifying the demon becomes.

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I would reply: Create silence! The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. And even if it were blazoned forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midst of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God. Therefore create Silence.

sessizliklerin en kesini susmak deÄŸil, konuÅŸmaktir.

In the deepest sense you shall make yourself nothing, become nothing before God, learn to be silent. In this silence is the beginning, which is to seek first God's kingdom

Mutismul cel mai sigur nu-i s? taci, ci s? vorbe?ti.

Only some one who knows how to remain essentially silent can really talk -- and act essentially

La angustia les resulta peligrosa a los hombres sin temple, y por eso la silencia, pero, pese a ello, renuncian a hablar de Abraham, y así lo hacen.

People do not know what they ought to say but only that they must say something.

Even if the words were terrible, even though it were a Shakespeare, a Byron, or a Shelley who broke the silence,20 the word always retains its redeeming power, because all despair and all the horror of evil expressed in one word are not as awful as silence.

People who do not know how to remain silent, do not know how to talk.

Intohimo ei merkitse sanoja.

They waited. Reiko let the silence and the sounds fill her. Having thought, I have acted, she thought. Let the arrow fly. In

This silence pours a solitariness Into the very essence of my soul; And the deep rest, so soothing and so sweet, Hath something too of sternness and of pain.

because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.

For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall.

Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. It's finished, we tell one another, it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.

Khattam-Shud,' he Said slowly 'is the arch-enemy of all stories, even of language itself. He is the prince of silence and the foe of speech. And because everything ends, because dreams ens, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. 'It is finished,' we tell one another, 'it's over, Khattam-Shud; the end.

From 'The Suicide', a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman: 'Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.

But it's not as simple as that, he told himself, because the dance of the Shadow Warrior showed him that silence had its own grace and beauty (just as speech could be graceless and ugly); and that Action could be as noble as Words; and that creatures of darkness could be as lovely as the children of the light. If Guppees and Chupwalas didn't hate each other so, he thought, they might actually find each other pretty interesting. Opposites attract, as they say.

Enough of invisibility, silence, timidity, defensiveness, guilt! An invisible, silenced man was an empty space into which others could pour their prejudices, their agendas, their wrath. The fight against fanaticism needed visible faces, audible voices. He would be quiet no longer. He would try to become a loud and visible man.

learning the knack of disconnecting her sense of smell, until she could switch it off like a radio and in the bland silence of its absence could drown in the sound of Nazarébaddoor's hypnotic voice without having her reverie interrupted by the scent of sheep shit or Nazarébaddoor's own frequent and extraordinary buffalo farts.