Silence Quotes
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The primary virtue is: hold your tongue; who knows how to keep quiet is close to God.
Cato the Younger
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Let true Christians then, with becoming earnestness, strive in all things to recommend their profession, and to put to silence the vain scoffs of ignorant objectors.
William Wilberforce
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I must indeed abide the Doom of Men whether I will or nill: the loss and the silence. But I say to you, King of the Numenoreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Elves say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.
Walter Brueggemann
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You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.
Barbara Brown Taylor
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There are only two ways to deal with the media: either elect to take the Buddha's vow of eternal silence, or make one's voice known as responsibly as one humanly can, and take the consequences.
Andrew Linzey
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What manly eloquence could produce such an effect as woman's silence?
Jules Michelet
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I unplug the phone and close the door and just stick with it. I don't ever go out for lunch and I don't take vacations. I like to be awake when no one else is: either just before dawn in the morning or late, late at night. Silence helps.
Mona Simpson
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Race is the great taboo in our society. We are afraid to talk about it. White folks fear their unspoken views will be deemed racist. People of color are filled with sorrow and rage at unrighted wrongs. Drowning in silence, we are brothers and sisters drowning each other. Once we decide to transform ourselves from fearful caterpillars into courageous butterflies, we will be able to bridge the racial gulf and move forward together towards a bright and colorful future.
Eva Paterson
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What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C.... The often welcome melodic lie.... The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space.... a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned.
Stephen Dunn
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Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin of silence, so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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People often ask me questions that I cannot very well answer in words, and it makes me sad to think they are unable to hear the voice of my silence.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
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The two friends stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence. (O Pioneers!)
Willa Cather
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The greatest ideas, the most profound thoughts, and the most beautiful poetry are born from the womb of silence
William Arthur Ward
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I like working in silence.
Eric Ripert
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I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.
Virginia Woolf
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Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.
Simone de Beauvoir
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But when I am around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.
Sarah Vowell
