Quotes on Silence

Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

God is silent. Now if only man would shut up.

Being on a comedy tour is like traveling with family, everyone is all having a great time... then all of a sudden it turns sour. One thing gets said out of turn, and everyone is on everyone's last nerve. After an hour of silence, we all start laughing about it.

Albert grunted. "Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?" Mort thought for a moment. "No," he said eventually, "what?" There was silence. Then Albert straightened up and said, "Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve 'em right.

Silence does not always mark wisdom.

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard [...]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.

You cannot pass," he said. The orcs stood still, and a dead silence fell. "I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

Since long I've held silence a remedy for harm.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.

It's not sincereity, it is truth which frees us, because it transforms us. It tears us away from our inmost slavery.

There's nothing to prove, nothing to figure out, nothing to get, nothing to understand. When we finally stop explaining everything to ourselves, we may discover that in silence, complete understanding is already there.

Prayer begins by talking to God, but it ends by listening to Him. In the face of Absolute Truth, silence is the soul's language.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.