Silence Quotes
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My soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its eyes wide open far-off things, and listens at the shores of the great silence.
Antonio Machado
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The mind of man may be compared to a musical instrument with a certain range of notes, beyond which in both directions we have an infinitude of silence.
John Tyndall
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We have to make the first move ourselves rather than expecting it to come from the phenomenal world or from other people. If we are meditating at home and we happen to live in the middle of the High Street, we cannot stop the traffic just because we want peace and quiet. But we can stop ourselves, we can accept the noise. The noise also contains silence. We must put ourselves into it and expect nothing from outside, just as Buddha did. And we must accept whatever situation arises.
Chogyam Trungpa
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There is an old story about the boy at Eton who committed suicide. The other boys in his house were gathered together and asked if any of them could suggest a reason for the tragedy. After a long silence a small boy in the front put up his hand: 'Could it have been the food, sir?
Auberon Waugh
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It is not a new tactic for people to use any avenue they can to silence black activists.
DeRay Mckesson
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The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Human rights are universal and indivisible. Human freedom is also indivisible: if it is denied to anyone in the world, it is therefore denied, indirectly, to all people. This is why we cannot remain silent in the face of evil or violence; silence merely encourages them.
Vaclav Havel
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There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens pages of these messengers of doom. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.
Alan Paton
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Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish.
Charles Caleb Colton
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What is the meaning of the immense silence that surrounds the dead?
Ernst Junger
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God far exceeds all words that we can here express In silence He is heard, in silence worshiped best
Angelus Silesius
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....it is not wise to keep the fire going under a slander unless you can get some large advantage out of keeping it alive. Few slanders can stand the wear of silence.
Mark Twain
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Don't you know that silence supports the accuser's charge?
Sophocles
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The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak. I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence...
Pablo Neruda
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The only pressure that you use in a professional selling presentation is the presence of silence after the closing question.
Brian Tracy
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Silence is the last thing the world will ever hear from me.
Marlee Matlin
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I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.
Cynthia Ozick
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We should silence anyone who opposes the right to freedom of speech.
Boyle Roche
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A lot of people get flipped out if you're quiet. They say stuff like, What are you thinking? And if they don't start interrogating you, they start talking, going on and on about stuff that's totally irrelevant, and the silence gets so big and loud that it's scary.
A.M. Homes
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To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.
Plato
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Quiet descended, a silence so consuming that even the drafty corridors ceased whistling. Bog wasn't certain where to look, so he solved the problem by plucking out his eyes and sticking them in a drawer.
A. Lee Martinez
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It never occurred to me that I was important enough to have some politician go out of his way to silence me. I only found out about it in the '80s by accident - a broadcaster announced they received letters of commendation from the White House for having suppressed my music. My career was so highly impacted in the U.S. it will never recover.
Buffy Sainte-Marie
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The more a man desirous to pass at a value above his worth can contrast, by dignified silence, the garrulity of trivial minds, the more the world will give him credit for the wealth which he does not possess.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.
Marcus Tullius Cicero