Quotes about silence
page 2

“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

Question

“If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet… maybe we could understand something.”

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker

Understanding

“Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever."
"And he has Brain."
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain."
There was a long silence.
"I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything.”

Benjamin Hoff book The Tao of Pooh

Source: The Tao of Pooh

Understanding

“What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.”

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French philosopher (1930-2004)

“Worse even
than your maddening
song, your silence." -”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Collected Poems

“Your silence gives consent.”

Plato book Cratylus

435b
Cratylus
Variant: I shall assume that your silence gives consent

“For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.”

Iris Murdoch book Under the Net

Source: Under the Net

Truth

“He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Deep, Understanding

“If you hear a voice within you saying, "You are not a painter," then by all means paint, boy, and that voice will be silenced, but only by working. He who goes to trends and tells his troubles when he feels like that loses part of his manliness, part of the best that's in him; your friends can only be those who themselves struggle against it, who raise your activity by their own example of action.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter from Drenthe, The Netherlands, Oct. 1883, 'Van Gogh's Letters', http://webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/13/336.htm 1880s, 1883

Feeling, Boy, Parting, Painting

“I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour
to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my
world.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

Death, World

“I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.”

Virginia Woolf book The Voyage Out

Source: The Voyage Out

People

“Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Death, Sadness

“Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

Light

“Jacinta never told Penelope that she loved her. The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Variant: The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.
Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Love

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Nobel acceptance speech (1986)

Suffering, Help

“Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.”

O. Henry (1862–1910) American short story writer

Love

“A pine tree standeth lonely
In the North on an upland bare;
It standeth whitely shrouded
With snow, and sleepeth there.

It dreameth of a Palm tree
Which far in the East alone,
In the mournful silence standeth
On its ridge of burning stone.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

Tree

“We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.”

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) Mexican artist, surrealist painter and novelist

Light, Time

“Silence is the perfectest herault of joy. I were but little happy if I could say how much.”

William Shakespeare book Much Ado About Nothing

Source: Much Ado About Nothing

Joy, Happiness

“When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

Source: Poems New and Collected

Past, Future

“I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

Books

“The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.”

Terry Pratchett book Guards! Guards!

Source: Guards! Guards!

Books, Nature, Time

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Source: Justine

Dependency

“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Source: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

God, Drink

“How small life is here
and how big nothingness.
The sky, tired of light,
has given everything to the snow.

The two trees bow
their heads to each other.
Clouds cross the world’s
silence in a circle dance”

Robert Walser (1878–1956) Swiss writer

Source: Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser

Life, World, Tree, Light

“Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear.”

Paul Beatty book The Sellout

Source: The Sellout

Fear, Time

“Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing. The same no-thing. They are externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“We reached for each other, and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake loving him in silence.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Love, Night

“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Pain, Forgiveness, Loss, Heart

“Anon, to sudden silence won,
In fancy they pursue
The dream-child moving through the land
Of wonders wild and new,
In friendly chat with bird or beast -
And half believe it true.”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

Dreams, Bird

“Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Dreams

“The rest, is silence.”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

“These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Humanity
One Minute Wisdom (1989)
Context: Much advance publicity was made for the address the Master would deliver on The Destruction of the World and a large crowd gathered at the monastery grounds to hear him.
The address was over in less than a minute. All he said was:
"These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness."

Religion, Learning, Wealth

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

"The Misery of Man Without God": "Man's Disproportion," The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal translated from the Text of M. Auguste Molinier https://books.google.com/books?id=LbkIAAAAQAAJ Tr. C. Kegan Paul (1885) Source: Pensées Context: When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space which I fill, or even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified, and wonder that I am here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, or now rather than then. Who has set me here? By whose order and design have this place and time been destined for me?—Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis. It is not well to be too much at liberty. It is not well to have all we want. How many kingdoms know nothing of us! The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.

“What is this thing called life? I believe
That the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life,
Only we do not call it so--I speak of the life
That oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo-
Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energy
Makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things grow
From a chemical reaction?
I think they were here already, I think the rocks
And the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxies
have their various consciousness, all things are conscious;
But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain
Bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass
To concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:
It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth
From which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animals
Born howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryard
Prefer silence; but those and all things have their own awareness,
As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all,
Like the cells of a man's body making one being,
They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

Source: The Selected Poetry

Love, Life, God, Pain

“The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth”

Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Time

“To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox Protest

Protest, contained in "Poems of Problems", pp. 154–55 (1914). This quotation is often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln.
Poetry quotes, New Thought Pastels (1913)

Men

“The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has great silence.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

176
Stray Birds (1916)

Truth, Water, Sea

“If what one has to say is not better than silence, then one should keep silent.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

“Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought.... life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.”

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) Brazilian writer

The Passion According to G.H. (1964), p. 169

Love, Life, Reality

“True silence is really endless speech.”

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) Indian religious leader

Abide as the Self

“Gratitude is a rare frame of mind; and those who are grateful can seldom find a way to express what they feel. They are overwhelmed by silence; are shamefaced; and, sometimes, actually try to hide their feelings.”

Stefan Zweig book Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman

Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927)

Way, Feeling, Gratitude

“And freedom will win -- not because it’s inevitable, not because it is ordained, but because these basic human yearnings for dignity and justice and democracy do not go away. They can be suppressed. At times, they can be silenced, but they burn in every human heart in a place where no regime could ever reach, a light that no army can ever extinguish. And so long as free peoples summon the confidence and the courage and the will to defend the values that we cherish, then freedom will always be stronger and our ideas will always prevail no matter what.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Remarks to the People of Estonia (September 2014)

People, Justice, Democracy, Confidence

“The essential in Christianity, past, present and future, is loving Christ and one another, and if the Quaker finds God in the silence and the Salvation Army in the band, the Roman Catholic in the Mass and the Baptist in immersion; if the High Anglican likes incense and ceremonial, and the Methodist puts his emphasis on personal experience, the fellowship of the authentic class meeting and Charles Wesley’s hymns, why talk of disunity?”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.29

Love, God, Past, Future

“"That light," said the Chaplain, "is it going up or coming down?"
"It's coming down," said Lord Asriel, "but it isn't light. It's Dust."
Something in the way he said it made Lyra imagine dust with a capital letter, as if this wasn't ordinary dust. The reaction of the Scholars confirmed her feeling, because Lord Asriel's words caused a sudden collective silence, followed by gasps of incredulity.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Source: His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass (1995), Ch. 1 : The Decanter of Tokay

Way, Feeling, Imagination, Light

“"Our Second Experiment", the Professor announced, as Bruno returned to his place, still thoughtfully rubbing his elbows, "is the production of that seldom-seen-but-greatly-to-be-admired phenomenon, Black Light! You have seen White Light, Red Light, Green Light, and so on: but never, till this wonderful day, have any eyes but mine seen Black Light! This box", carefully lifting it upon the table, and covering it with a heap of blankets, "is quite full of it. The way I made it was this - I took a lighted candle into a dark cupboard and shut the door. Of course the cupboard was then full of Yellow Light. Then I took a bottle of Black ink, and poured it over the candle: and, to my delight, every atom of the Yellow Light turned Black! That was indeed the proudest moment of my life! Then I filled a box with it. And now - would anyone like to get under the blankets and see it?"Dead silence followed this appeal: but at last Bruno said "I'll get under, if it won't jingle my elbows."Satisfied on this point, Bruno crawled under the blankets, and, after a minute or two, crawled out again, very hot and dusty, and with his hair in the wildest confusion."What did you see in the box?" Sylvie eagerly enquired."I saw nuffin!" Bruno sadly replied. "It were too dark!""He has described the appearance of the thing exactly!"”

Lewis Carroll book Sylvie and Bruno

the Professor exclaimed with enthusiasm. "Black Light, and Nothing, look so extremely alike, at first sight, that I don't wonder he failed to distinguish them! We will now proceed to the Third Experiment."
Source: Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), Chapter 21: The Professor's Lecture

Life, Way, Light, Appearance

“All round me are words, and words and words, They grow on me like leaves, they never Seem to stop their slow growing From within… But I tell my self, words Are a nuisance, beware of them, they Can be so many things, a Chasm where running feet must pause, to Look, a sea with paralyzing waves, A blast of burning air or, A knife most willing to cut your best Friend's throat… Words are a nuisance, but. They grow on me like leaves on a tree, They never seem to stop their coming, From a silence, somewhere deep within…”

Kamala Surayya (1934–2009) Indian author

Kamala Suraiyya Das (Summer in Calcutta)

Tree, Sea

“It’s just sex and violence, melody and silence.”

Richard Ashcroft (1971) English singer-songwriter

Bitter Sweet Symphony
Urban Hymns (1997)

Sex

“1953. Learn the art of Silence; the wise Man that holds his Tongue, says more than the Fool who speaks.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Fools, Art, Learning

“The overdevelopment of the maternal instinct is identical with that well-known image of the mother which has been glorified in all ages and all tongues. This is the motherlove which is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends. Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel like fate, 'oyous and untiring giver of life-mater dolorosa and mute implacable portal that closes upon the dead. Mother is motherlove, my experience and my secret. Why risk saying too much, too much that is false and inadequate and beside the point, about that human being who was our mother, the accidental carrier of that great experience which includes herself and myself and all mankind, and indeed the whole of created nature, the experience of life whose children we are? The attempt to say these things has always been made, and probably always will be; but a sensitive person cannot in all fairness load that enormous burden of meaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on to the shoulders of one frail and fallible human being-so deserving of love, indulgence, understanding, and forgiveness-who was our mother. He knows that the mother carries for us that inborn image of the mater nature and mater spiritualis, of the totality of life of which we are a small and helpless part.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

"Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious P.172

Love, Life, Fate, Children

“The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

August Spies (1855–1887) American upholsterer, radical labor activist, and newspaper editor

Cited in: Kenneth G. Alfers (1993) America's second century: readings in United States history since 1877. p. 43

“While the children laughed
I was always afraid
Of the Smile of the clown
So I close my eyes
Till I can't see the light
And I hide from the sound

We're two of a Kind
Silence and I
We need a chance to talk things over
Two of a kind
Silence and I”

Alan Parsons (1948) audio engineer, musician, and record producer from England

"Silence and I", from the album Eye In The Sky. (Written by Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson.)
Quotes from songs

Children, Smile, Light, Chance

“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Funeral Blues (1936)

Dogs

“Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 1, “Don’t Try” (p. 11)

Failure, Suffering

“There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose.”

Herman Melville book Pierre: or, The Ambiguities

First lines, Bk. I, ch. 1
Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)

World, Feeling, Flowers, Nature

“If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Cooper Union speech (1860)

Law

“I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?”

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker

"Television"
I'm a Born Liar (2003)

Thinking

“In between these four whitewashed walls, on this tiled floor, notice the broken corners, how some tiles have been worn smooth, how many feet have passed this way, and look how interesting this trail of ants is, travelling along the joins as if they were valleys, while up above, projected against the white sky of the ceiling and the sun of the lamp, tall towers are moving, they are men, as the ants well know, having, for generations, experienced the weight of their feet and the long, hot spout of water that falls from a kind of pendulous external intestine, ants all over the world have been drowned or crushed by these, but it seems they will escape this fate now, for the men are occupied with other things. […]
Let's take this ant, or, rather, let's not, because that would involve picking it up, let us merely consider it, because it is one of the larger ones and because it raises its head like a dog, it's walking along very close to the wall, together with its fellow ants it will have time to complete its long journey ten times over between the ants' nest and whatever it is that it finds so interesting, curious or perhaps merely nourishing in this secret room […]. One of the men has fallen to the ground, he's on the same level as the ants now, we don't know if he can see them, but they see him, and he will fall so often that, in the end, they will know by heart his face, the color of his hair and eyes, the shape of his ear, the dark arc of his eyebrow, the faint shadow at the corner of his mouth, and later, back in the ants' nest, they will weave long stories for the enlightenment of future generations, because it is useful for the young to know what happens out there in the world. The man fell and the others dragged him to his feet again, shouting at him, asking two different questions at the same time, how could he possibly answer them even if he wanted to, which is not the case, because the man who fell and was dragged to his feet will die without saying a word. Only moans will issue from his mouth, and in the silence of his soul only deep sighs, and even when his teeth are broken and he has to spit them out, which will prompt the other two men to hit him again for soiling state property, even then the sound will be of spitting and nothing more, that unconscious reflex of the lips, and then the dribble of saliva thickened with blood that falls to the floor, thus stimulating the taste buds of the ants, who telegraph from one to the other news of this singularly red manna fallen from such a white heaven.
The man fell again. It's the same one, said the ants, the same ear shape, the same arc of eyebrow, the same shadow at the corner of the mouth, there's no mistaking him, why is it that it is always the same man who falls, why doesn't he defend himself, fight back. […] The ants are surprised, but only fleetingly. After all, they have their own duties, their own timetables to keep, it is quite enough that they raise their heads like dogs and fix their feeble vision on the fallen man to check that he is the same one and not some new variant in the story. The larger ant walked along the remaining stretch of wall, slipped under the door, and some time will pass before it reappears to find everything changed, well, that's just a manner of speaking, there are still three men there, but the two who do not fall never stop moving, it must be some kind of game, there's no other explanation […]. [T]hey grab him by the shoulders and propel him willy-nilly in the direction of the wall, so that sometimes he hits his back, sometimes his head, or else his poor bruised face smashes into the whitewash and leaves on it a trace of blood, not a lot, just whatever spurts forth from his mouth and right eyebrow. And if they leave him there, he, not his blood, slides down the wall and he ends up kneeling on the ground, beside the little trail of ants, who are startled by the sudden fall from on high of that great mass, which doesn't, in the end, even graze them. And when he stays there for some time, one ant attaches itself to his clothing, wanting to take a closer look, the fool, it will be the first ant to die, because the next blow falls on precisely that spot, the ant doesn't feel the second blow, but the man does.”

José Saramago book Raised from the Ground

Source: Raised from the Ground (1980), pp. 172–174

Men, Fate, Secret, World

“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 (1902–1998) American historian

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

Pain, Past, Forgetting

“Against us is the law
With its immensity of strength and power
Against us is the law!
Police know how to make a man
A guilty or an innocent
Against us is the power of police!
The shameless lies that men have told
Will ever more be paid in gold
Against us is the power of the gold!
Against us is racial hatred
And the simple fact that we are poor

My father dear, I am a prisoner
Don't be ashamed to tell my crime
The crime of love and brotherhood
And only silence is shame”

Joan Baez (1941) American singer

"The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti, Part Two"
Sacco e Vanzetti (1971)

Love, Men, Law

“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 (1929–2018) American writer

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

Bird, Tree, Learning, Time

“There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with for evil so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Abt Vogler, ix.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Evil, Perfection

“Music and silence… combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.”

Marcel Marceau (1923–2007) French mime and actor

US News & World R eport (23 February 1987)

Music

“If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Tell-Tale Heart

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

Thinking, Madness, Night

“The band at the far end of the hall, amplified to the din of an elephant charge, smashed and hewed at the tune as though in a holy war against silence.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano

Source: Player Piano (1952), Chapter 19 (p. 188)

War

“The son of Joseph and Mary was born, like any other child, covered with his mother's blood, dripping with mucus, and suffering in silence. He cried because they made him cry, and he will cry for this one and only reason.”

José Saramago book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

O filho de José e de Maria nasceu como todos os filhos dos homens, sujo de sangue de sua mãe, viscoso das suas mucosidades e sofrendo em silêncio. Chorou porque o fizeram chorar, e chorará por esse mesmo e único motivo.
Source: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), p. 58

Suffering, Cry

“To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena — all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Letter to his sister Elena Sikorski (1945); in Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000) Edited and annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, p. 387.

World

“Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Emptiness
One Minute Wisdom (1989)

“In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence; the second, listening; the third, remembering; the fourth practicing; the fifth, teaching others”

Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021–1058) Avicebron

As quoted by Lama Surya Das, Huffington Post April 28, 2010 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lama-surya-das/spiritual-life-wisdom-an_b_552927.html.

Wisdom

“Silence is the wit of fools, and one of the virtues of the wise.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Le silence est l'esprit des sots Et l'une des vertus du sage. Bernard de Bonnard, "Le Silence," http://books.google.com/books?id=9gAvAAAAMAAJ&pg=PR14&dq=%22Et+l%27une+des+vertus+du+sage%22+Bonnard&ei=iyzvR-bFOIa4zASV0PyoBQ#PPA244,M1 L'Almanach des Muses (1776) Misattributed

Fools

“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 (1846–1888) English physician, activist and feminist

[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.

Women, Men, Books, Dead

“…the regions where there is only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

The Hands of the Father
Unspoken Sermons, First Series (1867)

Life, Music

“Talk had faded with the daylight. The silence that set in was oppressive. The encroaching dark, the groundmist collecting into small, curdled pools…for the first time it seemed perfectly real and totally unnatural, and he wanted either Jan or his mother, some woman, and he wondered what in the hell he was doing and how he ever could have gotten involved. He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn't even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.”

Stephen King book The Long Walk

The Long Walk (1979)

Fools, Hell, Time

“A little while ago, I stood by the grave of the old Napoleon, a magnificent tomb, and I gazed upon the sarcophagus of rare and nameless marble, where rest at last the ashes of that restless man. I leaned over the balustrade and thought about the career of the greatest soldier of the modern world. I saw him walking upon the banks of the Seine, contemplating suicide. I saw him at Toulon—I saw him putting down the mob in the streets of Paris—I saw him at the head of the army of Italy—I saw him crossing the bridge of Lodi with the tri-color in his hand—I saw him in Egypt in the shadows of the pyramids—I saw him conquer the Alps and mingle the eagles of France with the eagles of the crags. I saw him at Marengo—at Ulm and Austerlitz. I saw him in Russia, where the infantry of the snow and the cavalry of the wild blast scattered his legions like winter's withered leaves. I saw him at Leipsic in defeat and disaster—driven by a million bayonets back upon Paris—clutched like a wild beast—banished to Elba. I saw him escape and retake an empire by the force of his genius. I saw him upon the frightful field of Waterloo, where Chance and Fate combined to wreck the fortunes of their former king. And I saw him at St. Helena, with his hands crossed behind him, gazing out upon the sad and solemn sea. I thought of the orphans and widows he had made—of the tears that had been shed for his glory, and of the only woman who ever loved him, pushed from his heart by the cold hand of ambition. And I said I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes. I would rather have lived in a hut with a vine growing over the door, and the grapes growing purple in the kisses of the autumn sun. I would rather have been that poor peasant with my loving wife by my side, knitting as the day died out of the sky—with my children upon my knees and their arms about me—I would rather have been that man and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust, than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder, known as 'Napoleon the Great.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
About

Love, Fate, Children, World

“Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6

“The fish in the water is silent, the animal on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing, But Man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

43
Stray Birds (1916)

Music, Bird, Fish, Water

“How I suffered when I had to preach to you those pious lies that I detest in my heart. What remorse your credulity caused me! A thousand times I was on the point of breaking out publicly and opening your eyes, but a fear stronger than myself held me back, and forced me to keep silence until my death.”

Jean Meslier (1664–1729) French priest

Quoted in Thinker: Jean Meslier by Colin Brewer, in rationalist.org (3 July 2007) http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/1425/thinker-jean-meslier Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier

Death, Fear, Suffering, Time

“No art is superior to another one, but every art looks for expertise and perfection. This is life, which continues; this is why there is no death. There is continuation. There is no silence. There is a continuation of thought.”

Marcel Marceau (1923–2007) French mime and actor

Interview The Lantern (5 April 2001)

Life, Death, Art, Perfection

“We shall be quiet and wait till a star falls from heaven. Can you see, how above one light appears after the other and they together form a dome! We sit in silence and fold our hands in prayer. We shall be quiet and wait until a star falls from heaven.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Original: (de) Wir wollen stille sein und warten, bis ein Stern vom Himmel fällt. Siehst du, wie oben Licht an Licht sich zündet zu einem Dom! Wir sitzen im Schweigen und falten die Hände zum Gebet. Wir wollen stille sein und warten bis ein Stern vom Himmel fällt.
Source: Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Star, Light, Appearance, Waiting

“A fence to wisdom is silence.”

Akiba ben Joseph (50–136) Tanna

Pirkei Avot, 3:17.

Wisdom

“A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Sonnets to Orpheus

Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)

Tree, Appearance, Change, Singing

“As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time. Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest, the outermost limit?”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Six (23 December 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Love, Fate, Hope, Way

“Silence is the only answer you should give to the fools. Where ignorance speaks, intelligence should not give advices.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

The Lazio Speeches (1936), as quoted in The Book of Italian Wisdom by Antonio Santi, Citadel Press, (2003) p. 87.
1930s

Fools, Intelligence

“Privilege is a made up metric used to silence and repress. We are all different, and that is ok. We listen to individuals and help each other based on individual strengths and needs. We do not generalize based on skin color, bigot.”

Markus Persson (1979) Swedish video game programmer

In response to a Twitter user who tweeted to him that "it’s not OK to celebrate white privilege". " 'Minecraft' Creator Goes Full White Man Denying White Privilege on Twitter https://www.theroot.com/minecraft-creator-goes-full-white-privilege-denying-whi-1820904201". The Root. (November 30, 2017)

Color, Help

“Silence is the severest criticism.”

Charles Buxton (1823–1871) English brewer, philanthropist, writer and politician

Often misquoted as "Silence is sometimes the severest criticism."
Source: Notes of Thought (1883), p. 57

“In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind—“Geist”—was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

as quoted in The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Free Press: 1977), p. 187

Learning

“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

Haile Selassie (1892–1975) Emperor of Ethiopia

Cited as from an address in Addis Ababa (1963) in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988) http://www.bartleby.com/63/73/1173.html edited by James B. Simpson ISBN 0395430852

Justice, History, Evil, Indifference

“The air is bright with hues of light
And rich with laughter and with singing:
Young hearts beat high in ecstasy,
And banners wave, and bells are ringing:
But silence falls with fading day,
And there's an end to mirth and play.
Ah, well-a-day!”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Four Riddles, no. III
Rhyme? and Reason? (1883)

Laughter, Light, Singing, Heart

“It is Ill-manners to silence a Fool, and Cruelty to let him go on.”

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (1633–1695) English politician

Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Moral Thoughts and Reflections

Fools

“Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people’s Liberty teeth and keystone under Independence. The church, the plow, the prairie wagon, and citizens’ firearms are indelibly related. From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurrences and tendencies prove that to insure peace, security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable. Every corner of this Land knows firearms and more than 99 99/100 per cent of them by their silence indicate they are in safe and sane hands. The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference and they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good. When firearms go all goes, therefore we need them every hour.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

This is the conclusion to an article entitled "Older Ideas of Firearms" by C. S. Wheatley; it was published in the September 1926 issue of Hunter, Trader, Trapper (vol. 53, no. 3), p. 34. Wheatley had referred to George Washington's address to the second session of the first Congress immediately before this passage, which may have given rise to the mistaken attribution. See this piece http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/02/26/firearm/ at Quote Investigator Misattributed

People, Peace, Evil, Happiness

“When the loud day for men who sow and reap
Grows still, and on the silence of the town
The insubstantial veils of night and sleep,
The meed of the day's labour, settle down,
Then for me in the stillness of the night
The wasting, watchful hours drag on their course,
And in the idle darkness comes the bite
Of all the burning serpents of remorse;
Dreams seethe; and fretful infelicities
Are swarming in my over-burdened soul,
And Memory before my wakeful eyes
With noiseless hand unwinds her lengthy scroll.
Then, as with loathing I peruse the years,
I tremble, and I curse my natal day,
Wail bitterly, and bitterly shed tears,
But cannot wash the woeful script away.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

Remembrance.

Men, Dreams, Soul, Tear

“Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld!
Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night!
I feel ye now — I feel ye in your strength.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

" The Coliseum http://infomotions.com/etexts/literature/american/1800-1899/poe-coliseum-674.txt", st. 2 (1833).

Age, Feeling, Memory, Night

“Going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful.”

Amy Goodman (1957) American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter and author

The Exception to the Rulers written with David Goodman

“So high above all things that be.
Is God uplifted, man can dare.
No utterance: he prayeth best.
When Silence is his sum of prayer”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

God

“If you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines—the basis of life—developed, you find an eerie and complete silence. The complexity of life’s foundation has paralyzed science’s attempt to account for it; molecular machines raise an as-yet-impenetrable barrier to Darwinism’s universal reach.”

Michael J. Behe (1952) American biochemist, author, and intelligent design advocate

Source: Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996), p. (1996).

Life, Search, Literature, Question

“God far exceeds all words that we can here express
In silence He is heard, in silence worshiped best”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

God

“War!
Some of the invalids break the silence, and say the word again under their breath, reflecting that this is the greatest happening of the age, and perhaps of all ages. Even on the lucid landscape at which they gaze the news casts something like a vague and somber mirage.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision

War, Age

“This is the dawn I waited for
The new day clean and whole
When we emerge from night and silence
To freely inhabit the substance of time”

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1919–2004) Portuguese poet and writer

Esta é a madrugada que eu esperava
O dia inicial inteiro e limpo
Onde emergimos da noite e do silêncio
E livres habitamos a substância do tempo
"25 de Abril" ("25th April 1974"), in Log Book: Selected Poems, trans. ‎Richard Zenith (Carcanet, 1997), p. 78
O Nome das Coisas (1977)

Time, Waiting, Night

“I know that when the world
surrenders, pallid, to repose,
the murmur of a tranquil stream
through the deep silence flows.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

I (Yo soy un hombre sincero) as translated by Esther Allen in José Martí : Selected Writings (2002), p. 275
Simple Verses (1891)

World

“Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created.”

José Saramago book All the Names

The Registrar
All the Names (1997)

Law

Quotes about silence page 2

Quotes about silence
page 2