Quotes about silence

„From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.“

—  Ursula K. Le Guin American writer 1929 - 2018

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 5

„While the others had got married and moved out to suburbia, I had stayed in London and got into the arts scene through friends like Robert Fraser and Barry Miles and papers like The International Times. We opened the Indica gallery with John Dunbar, Peter Asher and people like that. I heard about people like John Cage, and that he’d just performed a piece of music called 4’33” (which is completely silent) during which if someone in the audience coughed he would say, ‘See?’ Or someone would boo and he’d say, ‘See? It’s not silence—it’s music.’ I was intrigued by all of that. So these things started to be part of my life. I was listening to Stockhausen; one piece was all little plink-plonks and interesting ideas. Perhaps our audience wouldn’t mind a bit of change, we thought, and anyway, tough if they do! We only ever followed our own noses—most of the time, anyway. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was one example of developing an idea.“

—  Paul McCartney English singer-songwriter and composer 1942

The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 212

„Is your voice “silence”?
When you are not singing a song then I hear your song’s melody clearly!
Your voice is silence. Is your face “darkness”?
When I shut my eyes then I see your face clearly!
Your face is darkness.Is your shadow “light”?
Your shadow is cast on the dark window after the moon has gone down!
Your shadow is light.“

—  Han Yong-un Korean writer 1879 - 1944

"Inverse Proportion", translated by Sammy Solberg

„It was amazing how quickly the silence fell on the crowd. It went from being so loud that you could barely hear the guys 20 feet away on the on-deck circle, to hearing my own footsteps loud and clear as I rounded the bases…that's never happened to me before.“

—  Albert Pujols Dominican-American baseball player 1980

On his go-ahead home run in the 2005 National League Championship Series against the Houston Astros http://sports.ign.com/articles/709/709384p1.html

„What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.“

—  Claude Monet French impressionist painter 1840 - 1926

„When you have something to say, silence is a lie.“

—  Jordan Peterson Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology 1962

„When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.“

—  Yukio Mishima, book Thirst for Love

Source: Thirst for Love

„Your treasure - your perfection - is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.“

—  Elizabeth Gilbert, book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

„Things are not going well for me. My chef at the Charité strongly disapproves of women students and took this means of showing it. About a hundred men (no women except myself) went round the wards today, and when we were all assembled before him to have our names written down, he called and named all the students except me, and then closed the book. I stood forward upon this, and said quietly, "Et moi aussi, monsieur." [And me, Sir. ] He turned on me sharply, and cried, "Vous, vous n'êtes ni homme ni femme; je ne veux pas inscrire vôtre nom."“

—  Anna Kingsford English physician, activist and feminist 1846 - 1888

[You, you are neither man nor woman; I don't want to write your name.] I stood silent in the midst of a dead silence.
Written to her husband in 1874; quoted in The Scalpel and the Butterfly by Deborah Rudacille (University of California Press, 2000), p. 35 https://books.google.it/books?id=BabamiCYEdUC&pg=PA35.

„We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.“

—  Ram Dass American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now 1931 - 2019

„Official science tried, by a conspiracy of silence, to kill the works of Marx, who by a theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism had proved that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly.“

—  Vladimir Lenin Russian politician, led the October Revolution 1870 - 1924

Source: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

„Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.“

—  Leonardo Da Vinci Italian Renaissance polymath 1452 - 1519

„Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.“

—  Oscar Wilde, book The Canterville Ghost

Source: The Canterville Ghost http://www.planetmonk.com/wilde/savile/canterville.c1.html (1887)

„I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.“

—  Herta Müller, book The Hunger Angel

Source: The Hunger Angel (2012), p. 3

„Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.“

—  Friedrich Nietzsche, book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

„We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past—Jefferson and Paine, Emerson and Thoreau—while we silence the rebels of the present.“

—  Henry Steele Commager American historian 1902 - 1998

Source: Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954), p. 147

„My child, let your life come into the world of darkness
like a spark of light, without flicker and pure,
and thank them in silence. You know,
my child, they are cruel in their greed and envy,
their words are disguised knives thirsting for blood.
But do not be afraid, my child, go and stand in their hearts,
and let your gentle eyes fall on them like the forgiving serenity of the night.
My child, let them see your face and so they know it
meaning of all things, let them love and love one another.
Go, at sunrise, open and lift up your heart like a blooming flower,
and at sunset, bend your head and silently complete the worship of the day.
Remember, my child, gods and demons, ghosts and elves are fragments of one,
built by the hand of the abyss.
So, move on, go to the shore of the vast darkness,
there, is the Great Meeting of Children,
there, the sea gives a smile to the beach,
there, sing the waves facing death.“

—  Alexis Karpouzos 1967

Source: https://dailywisdomwords.com/community-poetry/my-child/

„Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone to ask only the wrong one.“

—  Robin Hobb, book Fool's Errand

Source: Fool's Errand

„[Speaking about the US military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy] The health of a democracy is directly dependent on hearing the voices of its individual citizens. Silence is destructive. What could mar our safety more than this restrictive policy that requires its citizens' silence? What could mar our safety more than this restrictive policy that quietly attacks its own citizens' very selfhood out of fear? What keeps us truly unsafe as a country on a day-to-day basis is our inability to look inside and experience ourselves as a multitude, as a complexity. And as sure as I'm standing here, things are not always black or white, but sometimes they can be both.“

—  Jennifer Beals American actress and a former teen model 1963

Acceptance speech for The Center Orange County's "Torch Bearer" Award, Santa Ana, California (5 June 2010) http://jennifer-beals.com/media/speeches/oc_gala.html.