Silence Quotes

“Silence is the highest form of meditation.”

“I was tired in the evening yesterday. I felt drained by the last days outer conflicts. I felt separated from life. Suddenly I heard the wind blowing through the trees outside my open window, whispering a silent and playful invitation: "Do you want to play? Do you want to join the dance?" This playful invitation again joined my heart and being with the Existential dance. I was again in a silent prayer and oneness with life.”

“I Hear the sledges with the bells - Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells. II Hear the mellow wedding bells - Golden bells! What a world of happiness their harmony foretells! Through the balmy air of night How they ring out their delight! - From the molten - golden notes, And all in tune, What a liquid ditty floats To the turtle - dove that listens, while she gloats On the moon! Oh, from out the sounding cells, What a gush of euphony voluminously wells! How it swells! How it dwells On the Future! - how it tells Of the rapture that impels To the swinging and the ringing Of the bells, bells, bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells! III Hear the loud alarum bells - Brazen bells! What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells! In the startled ear of night How they scream out their affright! Too much horrified to speak, They can only shriek, shriek, Out of tune, In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire, Leaping higher, higher, higher, With a desperate desire, And a resolute endeavor Now - now to sit, or never, By the side of the pale - faced moon. Oh, the bells, bells, bells! What a tale their terror tells Of Despair! How they clang, and clash and roar! What a horror they outpour On the bosom of the palpitating air! Yet the ear, it fully knows, By the twanging, And the clanging, How the danger ebbs and flows; Yet the ear distinctly tells, In the jangling, And the wrangling, How the danger sinks and swells, By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells - Of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - In the clamor and the clanging of the bells! IV Hear the tolling of the bells - Iron bells! What a world of solemn thought their monody compels! In the silence of the night, How we shiver with affright At the melancholy menace of their tone! For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan. And the people - ah, the people - They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone - They are neither man nor woman - They are neither brute nor human - They are Ghouls: - And their king it is who tolls: - And he rolls, rolls, rolls, Rolls A paean from the bells! And his merry bosom swells With the paean of the bells! And he dances, and he yells; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the paean of the bells: - Of the bells: Keeping time, time, time In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the throbbing of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells: - To the sobbing of the bells: - Keeping time, time, time, As he knells, knells, knells, In a happy Runic rhyme, To the rolling of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells - To the tolling of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells, - To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.”

“You see an army running after you, every minute they become more and more you run as much faster as possible, you leave everything behind your back to safe your ass... and after all you are alone silence is with you.”

“Silence rolled at me, in”

“A day of silence can be a pilgrimage in itself.”

“and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.”

“Just when it seemed my mother couldn’t bearone more needle, one more insane orange pill,my sister, in silence, stood at the endof the bed and slowly rubbed her feet,which were scratchy with hard, yellow skin,and dirt cramped beneath the broken nails,which changed nothing in time exceptthe way my mother was lost in it for a whileas if with a kind of relief that doesn’t relieve.And then, with her eyes closed, my mother saidthe one or two words the living have for gratefulness,which is a kind of forgetting, with a senseof what it means to be alive long enoughto love someone. Thank you, she said. As for me,I didn’t care how her voice suddenly seemed lowand kind, or what failures and triumphsof the body and spirit brought her to that point—just that it sounded like hope, stupid hope.”

“Heavens is here 'neath the mountain walls,In the song of the wind and the waterfalls,In the watchful stars that blanket the nightAnd the music of birds before the dawn light.Heaven is here in our mountain keep.In the silence and dim of the forest deep,From the chestnut tall as the mightiest mast,To the laurel flowers in the shadow it casts.Heaven is here on theses mountains high, In ancient stone castles that challenge the sky,In the thunder and flash that ring from their fightAnd the meadows made gold by the day's final light.”

“The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.”

“Comfort blindfolds; difficulty brings realization.Pain reveals; disappointments plant trigger of actions.Fear controls; ignorance deceives.Anger torments; silence keeps.Misunderstanding divides; love joins.Laughter starts; deception suspects.Frowning cautions; sorrow remembers.Purposefulness moves; idleness wastes.When you live in comfort, ponder.When you live in pain, take lessons.When life goes up, plant your feet and appreciate the height.When life goes down, envision the height and dare to get there with tenacity. Life is how you take and manage things. Be a manager of things or things shall be your manager”

“Words are the fallen ruins of silent majesty.”

“the pavement makes no soundas it touches your feetcalm and constantlike silence on repeatlanguidly your thoughts bleedinto the evening airin crimson red the words read'some things are beyond repair”

“Young children begin very early to internalize information that either encourages or discourages self-disclosure. Cues are intuitively understood. Most of what we feel is unexamined and articulated. Cultural norms are unwittingly absorbed. We learn when to speak and when to stay silent. - Pam MacRae (Ch. 2)”

“Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own.Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own lives and selves. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned by fathers, punished by step-mothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in wh they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one.In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness -- from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sewn among the meek is harvested in crisis...In Hans Christian Andersen's retelling of the old Nordic tale that begins with a stepmother, "The Wild Swans," the banished sister can only disenchant her eleven brothers -- who are swans all day look but turn human at night -- by gathering stinging nettles barehanded from churchyard graves, making them into flax, spinning them and knitting eleven long-sleeved shirts while remaining silent the whole time. If she speaks, they'll remain birds forever. In her silence, she cannot protest the crimes she accused of and nearly burned as a witch.Hauled off to a pyre as she knits the last of the shirts, she is rescued by the swans, who fly in at the last moment. As they swoop down, she throws the nettle shirts over them so that they turn into men again, all but the youngest brother, whose shirt is missing a sleeve so that he's left with one arm and one wing, eternally a swan-man. Why shirts made of graveyard nettles by bleeding fingers and silence should disenchant men turned into birds by their step-mother is a question the story doesn't need to answer. It just needs to give us compelling images of exile, loneliness, affection, and metamorphosis -- and of a heroine who nearly dies of being unable to tell her own story.”

“Help" is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn't matter how you pray--with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, "Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.”

“The wind made me shiver as i pulled my arms into my T-shirt. There I was, cold, isolated and desperate for something I knew I couldn't have.A solution. A remedy. Anything.The silence continued except for my own footsteps. I hated it. Alone and confused was the last place I wanted to be.Somehow I knew I deserved this.”

“I love to read, and I like the fact that there's some silence in my life.”

“I move in silence. I don't like puttin' too much of me out there to be dissected, analyzed.”

“Prayer did not come easily to me for I always feel that prayer is a silent things, and opening of the heart. To ask for earthly benefits, to reel out a list of requirements and expect them to be supplied is not prayer. It is putting God in the same category as an intelligent grocer.”