Quotes About Silence

it was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words.

Public meetings, business meetings, encounters on the street, conversations, even posters on the wall all get wrapped up in an official language that doesn't contain a single word of truth. People in the West can't possibly understand what it is really like to lose the right to say what you think for years on end, and the way you have to repress the tiniest illegal thought you might have and stay silent as the tomb. That sort of pressure breaks something inside people.

Few places favor meditation more than the desert

Offering his own scalding stream of accusations, he terrified the opposition into silence. "By certain documents," Octavian promised to demonstrate that Antony constituted a threat to Rome. He fixed a date on which he would present his evidence. The opposing consuls had seen the daggers; they knew better than to await that session, and secretly fled the city. Nearly four hundred senators followed, sailing to Ephesus

I wanted to stop her; in the darkness and silence we occasionally managed to throw off our despair for a while by making each other forget.

We came here as we truly are, and when the other side shows us that truth—the part of it we pass over in silence—we're unable to come to terms with it!

los que más gritan por la paz, son los primeros en quebrantarla.

That is how the dream begins. All around me, something is awaiting my consent, my inner acquiescence, and I know, or rather the knowledge exists, that I must not give way to an unknown temptation, for the more the silence seems to promise, the more terrible the outcome will be. Yet I essentially know no such thing, because I would be afraid if I knew, and I never felt the slightest fear.

Si uno busca tranquilidad, silencio y serenidad, que no lo busque en su vida ya que encontrará todo y más en el cementerio.

For some time there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi', a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.

Hemos llegado aquí tal como somos en realidad y cuando la otra parte, la parte que silenciamos, nos muestra esa verdad ¡no somos capaces de aceptarlo!

On the whole, Flora liked it better when they were silent, though it did rather give her the feeling that she was acting in one of the less cheerful German highbrow films.

Only those could maintain certainty who were themselves of great permanence – like the stars, the mountains and the sea. And they in turn possessed no words with which to tell what they had come to know from their long existence.

No sun shall rise today for human eyes to see; the world entire is wrapped round in whirling white, an impenetrable cloud of cold and ice that chills the heart as it freezes the ground.

The slave ship at sea reduced African captives to an existence so physically atomized as to silence all but the most elemental bodily articulation, so socially impoverished as to threaten annihilation of the self, the complete disintegration of personhood. Here their commodification built toward a crescendo that threatened never to arrive, but to leave the African captives suspended in an agony whose language no one knew.

He and Marcus sipped and a companionable silence fell. Marcus nodded at the pile of news sheets and asked if anything truly important had occurred; Thomas's reply—that while according to the pundits, the skies were close to falling, as they always were in the pundits' eyes, nothing had changed that might even remotely impact the lives of those in their small corner of the world—made Marcus grin.

After the emergence of intelligence, the story of any biosphere tended to get a lot simpler. It was a major reason for the silence of the stars.

Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.

calls her beautiful, but she cannot hear...

The sound of the radio fades to nothing because the waves just can't reach

and let the quiet put things where they're supposed to be

When I was done reading the poem, everyone was quiet. A very sad quiet. But the amazing thing was that it wasn't a bad sad at all. It was just something that made everyone look around at each other and know that they were there. Sam and Patrick looked at me. And I looked at them. And I think they knew. Not anything specific really. They just knew. And I think that's all you can ever ask from a friend.

I guess she didn't know how much she talked or how much I listened.

When I was done reading the poem, everyone was quiet. A very sad quiet. But the amazing thing was that it wasn't a bad sad at all. It was just something that made everyone look around at each other and know that they were there.