Best 3011 quotes in «silence quotes» category

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

For someone who is far from God, silence is a difficult confrontation with his own self and with the rather dismal realities that are at the bottom of our soul. Hence, man enters a mentality that resembles a denial of reality. He gets drunk on all sorts of noises so as to forget who he is. Postmodern man seeks to anesthetize his own atheism.

For ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped there was so little public discussion of the bomb or of radioactivity that even the Chugoku Shinbun, the major newspaper of the city where the atomic bomb was dropped, did not have the movable type for 'atomic bomb' or 'radioactivity'. The silence continued so long because the U.S. Army Surgeons Investigation Team in the fall of 1945 had issued a mistaken statement: all people expected to die from the radiation effects of the atomic bomb had by then already died; accordingly, no further cases of physiological effects due to residual radiation would be acknowledged.

For the modern solitary, the quest for silence has vastly broader boundaries than what one's predecessors faced. Solitude is real only when it is relative to the world in which it is lived. It is unreal if attempted in fantasy--as though telephones and fax machines, the Internet and E-mail did not exist. (36)

For what was it about books that once finished left the reader in a bit of a haze and made them reread the last few sentences in order to continue the ringing in their hearts a while longer, so as not to let the silence illumine the fact that reading, they had gained something — distance, a lesson, a companion, a new world — but now, after the last full stop, they had lost something palpable and felt a little emptier than before.

Friends understand the unsaid words, no matter if they are silent for years.

From listening and silence can be learn a lot of, but these skills to be learn that's the hard and complicated work...

From the depths of silence The feeling rushes up A warrior of brightness Emerging from the dark With words of pure abandonment, A lust for emptiness, through art Of pure suffering and torment That sparks a beating heart A spark of light in darkness, And darkness be his light, When all is lost in numbness Sit still, no need to fight.

From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here and here, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against the intercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque. He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers, whispers that startle - ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes, or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves - it may be the leap of a wood rat, it may be the footstep of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig? What the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live! ("A Tough Tussle")

Gabriela's pupils were immoveable tempests, dark tunnels spiraling down into invisibility, terrifying the mother. They sat still amongst the greenish-brown puddle and attacked Estefania in total muteness.

Für einen Augenblick horchte er in den lautlos fallenden Schnee hinaus. Die Stille war vollkommen. Es war das Schweigen der Berge, das er so gut kannte und das doch immer noch imstande war, sein Herz mit Angst zu füllen.

Give the child a taste of meditation by creating a climate and atmosphere of love, acceptance and silence.

Go deeply into the urge to be silent and not the mental interference of how, where and when. If you follow silence to its source you can be taken by it in a moment.

God has no name. All organized religions have given names to God to be able to have a personal relationship to God, but God is not a person. God is the underlying force, the energy and the consciousness of existence. If you cannot feel God, the divine, within, you cannot feel him without. The first step is to feel God within. Then prayer to a personal god becomes meaningless, and meditation becomes meaningful. The second step is to realize God without, to realize that God is not the creator, he is creation. He is not separate from creation. He is the force and consciousness of creation. The world is God's dance; the world is God's play.

God is all that exists. Every stone, flower, tree, animal and human being are on a spiritual journey to recognize their true self, their divine essence. We have been living lives as stones, flowers, trees and animals in order to develop our consciousness. Stones, flowers and animals also have consciousness. The more matter, the less consciousness. The more consciousness, the less matter. God is not a person, God is the underlying thread of consciousness in existence. Real love means to realize that we are one with the other person, one with nature, and one with the trees, the stones, the earth and the blue sky. It means to realize that all of life is God. I was 9 years old when I had my first spiritual awakening, my first glimpse of wholeness with existence. This created a deep thirst and longing in my heart and being to return to this natural and effortless experience of being one with the Whole. I have always had the capacity to go within myself and to discover the silence within, the inner meditative quality, the inner source of love and truth, the inner language of silence. Now I notice that this silence is going deeper, and that I go beyond the ego and disappear into the silence. It is astonishing to realize that growing up actually means to become one with existence. It means to find the whole existence within myself, it means to discover that existence is alive in my own heart and being. The song of a bird echoes my own inner voice, the beauty of a flower reflects my own inner beauty, a dog becomes an expression of my own unconditional love and friendship, the majestic mountains create an ecstatic joy, and I discover all the shining stars of the sky within my own heart. It is to realize that the whole existence is alive, and that the underlying thread of consciousness is God. Silence is the inner door to God.

Good people who are always silent for bad people to gain freedom and do their worsts are the most dangerous wastes the world ever has.

Go where the silence says something good.

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest has failed.

Have you ever been by yourself with no distractions? No radio, no TV, no internet, no mobile. Have you every been yourself in complete and utter silence? With no expectations and nothing else to do? Silence heals.

Habla muy deprisa, como si el silencio la asustara.

Happy is the man who finds a walking companion who knows how to keep silence and when to talk, who is in unison not only with yourself but with all the vibrant chords of nature around

…he didn’t needs words or even want them because he knew how they could lie, could heat your blood and disappear.

He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment. Sometimes the dullness came to the fore with a strange and insistent ache which he would entertain briefly, but learn to keep at bay. Mostly, however, it was the contentment he entertained; the slow ease and the silence could, once night had fallen, fill him with a happiness that nothing, no society nor the company of any individual, no glamour or glitter, could equal.

He grinned back at me, and I remembered how normal he’d made me feel the first time we’d met. Here, once again, he wasn’t bothered by my silence. And I suddenly realized what made me feel so uncomfortable about Elizabeth’s exploits. The people she attracted were drawn to the same thing everyone else was: our glowing skin, dreamy eyes, and air of secrecy. But this boy? He seemed to see more than that. He saw me not just as a mysterious beauty, but as a girl he wanted to know. He didn’t stare at me. He spoke to me.

He had nothing else to say. His shame already spoke volumes.

He looked at the houses he had been passing these weeks and though he had never studied them carefully they had become familiar through the process of seeing them so often, and he was now impressed with the change in their appearance as he looked at them through the gray of the air and whiteness of the snow, each house, shrub, tree, bush and mailbox trimmed with snow and blending into the air as if they were just a picture projected upon the still, pearly grayness, just an impression created by the silent snow, a picture on the edge and verge of disappearing and leaving only the air and snow through which he now lightly walked. It did not seem possible, but the air was even softer and quieter. He continued walking alongside his prints feeling he could walk forever, that as long as the silent snow continued falling he could continue walking, and as he did he would leave behind all worries and cares, all horrors of the past and future. There would be nothing to bother him or torture his mind and fill his body with tremors of fear, the dark night of the soul over. There would only be himself and the soft, silent snow; and each flake, in its own life, its own separate and distinct entity, would bring with it its own joy, and he would easily partake of that joy as he continued walking, the gentle, silent snow falling ever so quietly, ever so joyously ... yes, and ever so love-ing-ly ... loveing-ly....

He kept coming back to the silence. It was so big. And surprising. Even when a donkey brayed somewhere in the same valley - loud, long and loaded with loneliness - it did not change the silence, it enhanced it. Like jewels around a beautiful neck. Ed smiled. You can be at the poshest hotel in the country, on the planet even, but a farmer can still put a lonely donkey in the field next door. In the same way he couldn't control what arose in his mind - or appears in the world around him - but he could give it space.

He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure.

He prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands,

Her bare feet whispered across the floor as she approached him with the sort of stealth that only small children and trained killers possess.

He looked down at the street, and the unbroken whiteness, and watched his foot touch the snow and listened to the slight crunching sound as he stepped forward. He looked back at his footprints. They were fascinating. He had been the only one to walk along this street today. There wasn’t even the mark of a dog or squirrel, or the scratch of a bird. He continued through the soft, silent snow, a feeling of peace starting to flow through him, helping make his step lighter and easier.

He sat and looked at her. “How is Mary Darling?” “Fast asleep after playing and having a bath,” she said. “The nursery is lovely.” “I’m glad you like it.” “Rose and Annie are obviously practiced nursemaids, and what is even better, they seem to like Mary, and she them.” He grunted. “It would take a hard heart to turn away from my Mary Darling.” A smile curved the corners of her lips. “You didn’t seem too enamored of her when you first met.” “She has a forceful personality, as do I. We just took a bit to get to know one another.

Her silence should be feared more than her words.

Her thoughts are full of other things just now; and people have such different ways of showing feeling: some by silence, some by words.

Her today's silence is the unheard shouts from past that you never listened.

He sometimes halted without saying anything. Either he had finally nothing to say or while having something to say he finally decided not to say it.

He was probably being so quiet because he was trying not to say it out loud.

He who restrains his tongue has a leash on his enemy.

His silence had already spoken a thousand words.

How devastating it is to be thought of as arrogant. Surely, we have known each other long enough and well enough, for her to understand that my silence only reflects my sense of trust and satisfaction.

Hope transcends everything. It goes beyond all doubts. It silences fear. It quiets despair.

How does something so invisible make one so invincible?

However much silence you behold, that amount of intellect will stop.

How can we pick and choose which parts of the Bible to follow? One thing is God’s will and another is just cultural differences? What if it’s all cultural? What if homosexuality or saving yourself for marriage is as outdated as women staying silent in church or Leviticus forbidding tattoos?

Humph.” She peered down suspiciously as he parted the leaves to reveal the choke. “That doesn’t look very tasty.” “That’s because it isn’t,” he said. “Pay heed: the artichoke is a shy vegetable. She covers herself in spine-tipped leaves that must be carefully peeled away, and underneath shields her treasure with a barricade o’ soft needles. They must be tenderly, but firmly, scraped aside. Ye must be bold, for if yer not, she’ll never reveal her soft heart.” He finished cutting away the thistles and placed the small, tender heart on the center of her plate. She wrinkled her nose. “That’s it? But it’s so small.” “Ah, and d’ye judge a thing solely upon size alone?” She made a choking sound.

How quiet it is,' Danny said, digging in his knapsack for the canteen full of water he had brought. 'You don’t realize how scary it is, having a whole mountain on top of you, until you’re in the dark as I was in that tunnel, or when you begin hearing the silence.' 'I didn’t know you could hear silence,' said Irene. 'Then just listen.' They sat still, and Danny added, 'Put out the flashlights for a minute.' In the dark, they understood what he meant. All the familiar noises of the upper world were gone: the wind, the rustle of branches or leaves, the chirping of birds, the sounds of automobiles and doors slamming, and people laughing. There was nothing but the faint tinkle of droplets of water, each drop like a distant musical chime, and each one pursued by tiny echoes. Then, after such a note had sounded there would be a long and empty quiet in which they could hear their own breathing and the steady beating of their hearts. They found themselves straining their eyes to see something, anything — the slightest sign of light, but they could not even tell the difference between opening their eyes and shutting them. Irene burst out suddenly, 'Put on the lights!' Danny let out his breath with a whoosh. They all snapped on their lamps, and as the welcome light flooded the chamber, he said, 'It’s — it’s like being buried alive.' 'Don’t let’s try that experiment again,' Irene said, with a shiver. 'I just hope we get out of here before our flashlights give out.

I always thought I was an extrovert until I became a theatre major. Then I realised I just didn't like silence.

Hudson looks at me, waiting for what I was trying to say, but no matter how many times I try, the words won’t come. My chest contracts, and panic knocks my thoughts into disarray faster than a tornado. For years, I was silent by choice. Now, choking and straining and silently screaming, I actually know what it’s like to be silenced.

I am afraid that I may die tomorrow without knowing myself. My life experiences have taught me that a frightful chasm separates me from the others. The same experiences also have taught me when to remain silent and keep my thoughts to myself. Nevertheless, I have decided that I should write. That I should introduce myself to my shadow―the stooped shadow on the wall that voraciously swallows all that I put down. It is for him that I am making this experiment to see if we can know each other better. Since the time when I severed my ties with others, I want to know myself better. Absurd thoughts! Fine. Yet these thoughts torture me more than any reality. Are not these people who resemble me, who seemingly share my needs, whims and desires gathered here to deceive me? Are they not shadows brought into existence to mock and beguile me? Are not all my feelings, observations, and calculations imaginary and quite different from reality? I write only for the benefit of my shadow on the wall. I need to introduce myself to it. I thought in this base world, full of poverty and misery, for the first time in my life, a ray of sunshine shone on my life. But alas, instead of a sunbeam it was a transient beam, a shooting star that appeared to me in the likeness of a woman or an angel. In the light of that moment that lasted about a second, I witnessed all my life's misfortunes, and discovered their magnitude and grandeur. Then that beam of light disappeared into the dark abyss for which it was destined. No. I could not keep that transient beam for myself.

I am always quiet so that I know what to say when I must speak.