Quotes About Silence

if you speak of this I will tear out your voice and top it down the nearest drain

I heard you. Sometimes, in silence, at night, I hear the voices of things beyond eyesight, like echoes of ancient songs. I heard your voice, lonely in my dreams—it woke me, so I came. You see, I know how it is when you speak a name into an empty room with no one on earth to answer to it.

When he held a candle across the threshold, the black swallowed the fire completely. When he tried to step across it, he felt nothing beneath his foot. Sometimes he heard rain, a bird-cry, wind soughing through tall trees; mostly he was aware only of an intimation of vastness, silence, as though he stood at the edge of a world. He saw nothing. So he let the charcoal imagine what might lie on the other side of the door.

He could think no longer; he leaned against his shadow. The silence within the slab of ancient stone eased through him; his thoughts, worn meaningless, became quiet again.

He turned reluctantly, driven away by the cold, but still listening until he passed into noisy spring again and found his way back home. He took the silence with him, though; he heard it in his dreams, where a part of him waited patiently for the ancient dreamers to speak a word as old and slow as stone.

He had, she realized slowly, a gift for silence. When he chose, it seemed to ebb out of him, the word silence of old trees or stones lying motionless for years. It was measured to his breathing, in his motionless, scarred hands. He moved abruptly, soundlessly, and it flowed with him as he turned...

That sleep that has no language, No dream, No time, No end.

I did not say what I thought; perhaps, if it remained unspoken, it would become untrue.

If nobody's talking, then nobody can say no.

His queen is a ghost of what she must once have been. A pale woman with a perpetual twilight in her eyes, who rarely speaks. But within her silence, she carries like a rich treasure the tales of Serre.

in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of.

Therese could not think of a single question that would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.

A terrible silence fell in the room. Bill Ireton looked suddenly sober as a trout.

Carol only smiled at her, a little

Sintió que el sí quedaba absorbido por la oscuridad, no como las demás noches, en que el sí había sido mudo, sin ni siquiera salir de él mismo. El sí deshizo el nudo que tenía en la cabeza tan bruscamente que le hizo daño. Era lo que había estado esperando decir, lo que el silencio de la habitación y las bestias al otro lado de las paredes habían estado esperando oír.

They sat in silence until the howl of a distant coyote made her shiver. He sings for his mate, Cade reassured her. Does he think the sound of his loneliness will attract her? Lily asked wryly. I'm sure it is the beauty of his song. His voice contained almost a hint of a chuckle. I'm sure that's what he thinks. Her scoffing hid an undertone of bitterness, and Cade was silent for a while. Men often hide their fears with actions, he finally said. By

Seja mais sábio do que os outros se puder, mas não avise a ninguém.

As I look back now I wonder how I was ever able to sell anything. I lost years of my life in scrapping and arguing. I keep my mouth shut now. It pays.

Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence. The invention of printing, technics, compulsory education— nothing has so altered man as this lack of relationship to silence, this fact that silence is no longer taken for granted, as something as natural as the sky above or the air we breathe. Man who has lost silence has not merely lost one human quality but his whole structure has been changed thereby. — MAX PICARD FRENCH PHILOSOPHER

Very few of us ever walk in the fields and the woods, not talking or singing songs, but just walking quietly and observing things about us and within ourselves. — J. KRISHNAMURTI INDIAN PHILOSOPHER

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak. — SPINOZA DUTCH PHILOSOPHER

The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions for fear of revealing their doubts or being thought of as strange. There is an implicit conspiracy of silence on religious matters in the churches. This conspiracy covers up the fact that the churches do not change lives or influence conduct to any appreciable degree.

But—for good reasons rooted deeply in the nature of the person and of personal relationships—his preferred way is to speak, to communicate: thus the absolute centrality of scripture to our discipleship. And this, among other things, is the reason why an extensive use of solitude and silence is so basic for growth of the human spirit, for they form an appropriate context for listening and speaking to God.1

Seek not to speak, but that you might have something to say.