Quotes About Silence

I don't want an ambulance. I want you to sit down and shut up. But Signore, an ambulance could take you to a hospital. They could help you. I don't want to die in a hospital. You wouldn't! You'd live! Alessandro closed one eye. I don't want to be alive in a hospital, either.

In some parts of Sweden it was "a dream porridge," in others a pancake, that was made in silence and heavily salted. The custom was that the girl would eat this salty food and then go to sleep without drinking anything. As she slept, her future husband would come to her in a dream and give her water to quench her thirst. No data are available on the success rate of Swedish girls using this system to find a mate.

Yes, I'm a terrific teacher : Grow, Sarah, but not too much. Understand yourself, but not better than I understand you. Be brave, but not so brave you don't need me any more. Your silence frightens me. When I'm in that silence, I hear nothing, I feel like nothing. I can never pull you into my world of sound any more than you can open some magic door and bring me into your silence. I can say that now.

There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.

Stop talking, stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand. —SENG-TS'AN

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

It snowed. It snowed all yesterday and never emptied the sky, although the clouds looked so low and heavy they might drop all at once with a thud.

Her courtesy, her compliance, and especially her silence dated from a time otherwise gone.

a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.

All those things for which we have no words are lost.

Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code. And it could be that for beauty, as it turned out to be for French, that there is no key, that "oui" will never make sense in our language but only in its own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one.

When stories are not told, we risk losing our way.

It was a moment of equal parts anxiety and awe, like the striking of a wide seam of gold. The prospector sinks to his knees--he's only been looking for coal. At a gush of oil he'd hoot, baptize himself and buy the drinks. But the sight of gold is different. He observes a moment's silence. Then he rises, eyes watering. How to get it properly out of the earth? How not to be robbed in the meantime?

It's a long silence but far from empty.

It's an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you've been and whats happened. In the end, you're just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.

These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.

He seemed about to speak; then, as if he could not give sufficient weight to the words while we walked, he stopped and faced me.

The two of them might have met on that high place deliberately for public celebration of some rite or sacrifice. At first neither said a word. That seemed an age. At last Dr Trelawney took the initiative. Raising his right arm slightly, he spoke in a low clear voice, almost in the accents of one whose very perfect enunciation indicates that English is not his native tongue.

She scarcely spoke at all and might have been one of those huge dolls which, when inclined backwards, say Ma-ma or Pa-pa: though impossible to imagine in any position so undignified as that required for the mechanism to produce these syllables.

Maclintick did not answer. He removed the cork from a bottle, the slight 'pop' of its emergence appearing to em-body the material of a reply to his wife, at least all the reply he intended to give.

Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence.

To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. —ARISTOTLE