Quotes About Silence

All the chief knew for sure was that in hard times The People should hold together, and last winter they had not done so. They had inflicted an injustice on themselves and the two old women, and he knew that The People had suffered silently since that day.

We are so ignorant of our true condition that we know little more of ourselves than our name and address and how much we have; of our selfishness, our envy, our detraction, our sin, we know absolutely nothing. In fact, in order that we may never know ourselves, we hate silence and solitariness.

In fact, in order that we may never know ourselves, we hate silence and solitariness. Lest our conscience should carry on with us an unbearable repartee, we drown out its voice in amusements, distractions, and noise. If we met ourselves in others, we would hate them.

Midnight The hours glide Like drops of water on a window pane Midnight silence Fear unrolls in the air And the wind hides at the bottom of the well OH It's a leaf We think the earth is going to end Time stirs in the shadow Everyone is asleep A SIGH Inside the house someone has just died

It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.

Here we stop. On the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, a finger to his lips.

We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult where everything speaks except our mouths. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.

So a voice in the mountain is enough to let loose an avalanche. A word too much may be followed by a caving in. If the word had not been spoken, it would not have happened.

At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette's dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes.

Noise does not waken a drunkard; silence wakens him.

We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult wherein everything speaks except our mouth. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.

Let misery hide itself in silence, otherwise it becomes treason.

Thus those two beings, so exclusively and touchingly devoted, who had lived so long for each other alone, came to suffer side by side, each through the other, without ever speaking of the matter, without reproaches, each wearing a smile.

Il crepuscolo piace solo ai pipistrelli.

Pierce through the livid face of a human being at certain moments as they ponder, look behind the facade, look into the soul, look into the darkness. There, beneath the outer silence, titanic struggles are taking place. What a somber thing is this infinity that each man carries within him and against which he measures in despair what his his brain wants and what his life puts into action!

The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his breast, his arms hanging, his legs rigid, appeared to await nothing now but a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone.

The past surged up before him facing the present; he compared them and sobbed. The silence of tears once opened, the despairing man writhed. He felt that he had been stopped short.

The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he turned abruptly to the director of the hospital.

Good! And what if you should happen to cough or to sneeze? A man who is making his escape does not cough or sneeze.

Aures habet, et non audiet.

Taisez-vous, qui que vous soyez, vous qui parlez ici, taisez-vous ! vous croyez être dans la question, vous n'y êtes pas.

one speaks to one's self, talks to one's self, exclaims to one's self without breaking the external silence; there is a great tumult; everything about us talks except the mouth. The realities of the soul are none the less realities because they are not visible and palpable.

He who has not been a determined accuser during prosperity should hold his peace in adversity.

As we have just observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness.