“Long ago, among other lies they were taught that silence was bravery.”

— Charles Bukowski, book Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit

Source: Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Long ago, among other lies they were taught that silence was bravery." by Charles Bukowski?

Charles Bukowski555

American writer 1920–1994

Related quotes

“Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.”

Aristotle book Poetics

1460a.19
Poetics
Variant: It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

“And she walked away in silence,
It's strange, how you never know,
But we'd both gotten what we'd asked for,
Such a long, long time ago.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Taxi
Song lyrics, Heads & Tales (1972)

“The real importance of Swedenborg lies in the doctrines he taught, which are the reverse of the gloom and hell-fire of other breakaway sects.”

Colin Wilson book The Occult: A History

Source: The Occult: A History (1971), p. 280
Context: The real importance of Swedenborg lies in the doctrines he taught, which are the reverse of the gloom and hell-fire of other breakaway sects. He rejects the notion that Jesus died on the cross to atone for the sin of Adam, declaring that God is neither vindictive nor petty-minded, and that since he is God, he doesn't need atonement. It is remarkable that this common-sense view had never struck earlier theologians. God is Divine Goodness, and Jesus is Divine Wisdom, and Goodness has to be approached through Wisdom. Whatever one thinks about the extraordinary claims of its founder, it must be acknowledged that there is something very beautiful and healthy about the Swedenborgian religion. Its founder may have not been a great occultist, but he was a great man.

“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

Truth of Intercourse.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?

“The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

“We dare not even by silence sanction lies.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

" The Third of February, 1852 http://home.att.net/%7ETennysonPoetry/tfe.htm", st. 2 (1852) Context: We love not this French God, the child of hell, Wild War, who breaks the converse of the wise; But though we love kind Peace so well, We dare not even by silence sanction lies. It might be safe our censures to withdraw, And yet, my Lords, not well; there is a higher law.