Bk. XIV, ch. 1
A paraphrase of the last portion of this has sometimes been cited as a quotation of Melville: God's one and only voice is silence.
Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)
“In the school of Pythagoras, taciturnity was the symbol of abstracted and superlative knowledge, and the silence of the Egyptians was agnited as an expressive manner of divine adoration; this caused the pontiffs of Hierapolis to sacrifice to the great deity in silence, impercussively, without any vociferous or obstreperous sound.”
Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Fifth Book (1564), Chapter 20 : How the Quintessence cured the sick with a song
Context: Queen Whims, or Queen Quintessence (which you please), perceiving that we stood as mute as fishes, said: Your taciturnity speaks you not only disciples of Pythagoras, from whom the venerable antiquity of my progenitors in successive propagation was emaned and derives its original, but also discovers, that through the revolution of many retrograde moons, you have in Egypt pressed the extremities of your fingers with the hard tenants of your mouths, and scalptized your heads with frequent applications of your unguicules. In the school of Pythagoras, taciturnity was the symbol of abstracted and superlative knowledge, and the silence of the Egyptians was agnited as an expressive manner of divine adoration; this caused the pontiffs of Hierapolis to sacrifice to the great deity in silence, impercussively, without any vociferous or obstreperous sound. My design is not to enter into a privation of gratitude towards you, but by a vivacious formality, though matter were to abstract itself from me, excentricate to you my cogitations.
Having spoken this, she only said to her officers, Tabachins, a panacea; and straight they desired us not to take it amiss if the queen did not invite us to dine with her; for she never ate anything at dinner but some categories, jecabots, emnins, dimions, abstractions, harborins, chelemins, second intentions, carradoths, antitheses, metempsychoses, transcendent prolepsies, and such other light food.
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Francois Rabelais 105
major French Renaissance writer 1494–1553Related quotes
Dejan Stojanovic
(1959) poet, writer, and businessman
Silence Is the Universal Library http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21396/Silence_Is_the_Universal_Library_
From the poems written in English
Jiddu Krishnamurti
(1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher
Vol. II, p. 30
1980s, Letters to the Schools (1981, 1985)
Context: Attention involves seeing and hearing. We hear not only with our ears but also we are sensitive to the tones, the voice, to the implication of words, to hear without interference, to capture instantly the depth of a sound. Sound plays an extraordinary part in our lives: the sound of thunder, a flute playing in the distance, the unheard sound of the universe; the sound of silence, the sound of one’s own heart beating; the sound of a bird and the noise of a man walking on the pavement; the waterfall. The universe is filled with sound. This sound has its own silence; all living things are involved in this sound of silence. To be attentive is to hear this silence and move with it.
“In every sound sleeps the silence.”
“Scream,” p. 34
The Creator (2000), Sequence: “Forest of the Universe”
Source: Midnight's Children
“Silence is the perfect expression of scorn.”
George Bernard Shaw
(1856–1950) Irish playwright
Pt. V http://books.google.com/books?id=sUKiG0ghhb4C&q=%22Silence+is+the+most+perfect+expression+of+scorn%22&pg=PA255#v=onepage
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)