Quotes About Silence

Moments mystérieux pendant lesquels, privée de tout courage et incapable de mouvement, elle semblait ne rien faire, alors qu'accomplissant un travail infini, elle ne cessait de descendre jeter par-dessus bord pensées de vivante, pensées de morte pour se creuser en elle un asile d'extrême silence.

The tone is not the writer's voice, but the intimacy of the silence he imposes upon the word. This implies that the silence is still his—what remains of him in the discretion that sets him aside. The tone makes great writers, but perhaps the work is indifferent to what makes them great.

Quand tout est dit, ce qui reste à dire est le désastre, ruine de parole, défaillance par l'écriture, rumeur qui murmure : ce qui reste sans reste.

more or less in keeping with the intuition, common to the greater part of men, that death is a falling into a dark and immense silence, into an indefinite unconsciousness.

Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence; neither will Virtue Work except in secrecy.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together ... Speech is too often ... the act of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal ... Speech is of Time, silence is of Eternity ... It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another ...

it is that such of us as have loved deeply have learnt many secrets that are unknown to others; for thousands and thousands of things quiver in silence on the lips of true friendship and love, that are not to be found in the silence of other lips, to which friendship and love are unknown. …

If I tell some one that I love him – as I may have told a hundred others – my words will convey nothing to him; but the silence which will ensue, if I do indeed love him, will make clear in what depths lie the roots of my love, and will in its turn give birth to a conviction, that shall itself be silent; and in the course of a lifetime, this silence and this conviction will never again be the same. …

Niemand is waarlijk mijn vriend, voordat we geleerd hebben in elkanders tegenwoordigheid te zwijgen.

It is a thing that knows no limit, and before it all men are equal; and the silence of king or slave, in presence of death, or grief, or love, reveals the same features, hides beneath its impenetrable mantle the self-same treasure. For this is the essential silence of our soul, our most inviolable sanctuary, and its secret can never be lost;

And it is because we all of us know of this sombre power and its perilous manifestations, that we stand in so deep a dread of silence. We can bear, when need must be, the silence of ourselves, that of isolation: but the silence of many - silence multiplied - and above all the silence of a crowd - these are supernatural burdens, whose inexplicable weight brings dread to the mightiest soul.

However imperfect our conception of virtue, still let us cling to it; for a moment's forgetfulness exposes us to all the malignant forces from without. The simplest lie to myself, buried though it may be in the silence of my soul, may yet be as dangerous to my inner liberty as an act of treachery on the marketplace. Widfom and Destiny

When once misfortune enters a house, silence is in vain.

There is always a wonderful silence here…. One could hear the water sleep….

As gold and silver are weighed in pure water, so does the soul test its weight in silence, and the words that we let fall have no meaning apart from the silence that wraps them round.

Have we," asks Claude de Saint-Martin, the great 'unknown philosopher,' "have we advanced one step further on the radiant path of enlightenment, that leads to the simplicity of men?" Let us wait in silence: perhaps ere long we shall be conscious of "the murmur of the gods.

I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed.

Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.

Now if we rid our minds of the idea that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text, we shall see that the idea of a complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive--that is, if you wish, silence.

philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with "word-meanings", it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression.

Language realizes, by breaking the silence, what the silence wished and did not obtain.

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.

Power is of the order of the tacit.

The universe is defined not by what one sees, what one says, but precisely by what one does not see, precisely what one does not say: by the difference between the one and the other.