Quotes & Sayings About Silence And Evil

When the ships had lifted, they returned across the river to the silence of death. Then his grandfather told him, "Many fine things your father had planned for you: learning and useful work and a life of satisfaction and peace. Do you recall this?"
"Yes, Grandfather."
"The learning you shall have. You will learn patience and resource, the ability of your hands and your mind. You will have useful work: the destruction of evil men. What work could be more useful? This is Beyond; you will find that your work is never done - so therefore you may never know life of peace. However, I guarantee you ample satisfaction, for I will teach you to crave the blood of these men more than the flesh of woman."
The old man had been as good as his word. — Jack Vance

But to be is still more marvelous, because it is endless and requires no demonstration. To be is music, which is a profanation of silence in the interest of silence, and therefore beyond good and evil. Music is the manifestation of action without activity. It is the pure act of creation swimming on its own bosom. Music neither goads nor defends, neither seeks nor explains. Music is the noiseless sound made by the swimmer in the ocean of consciousness. It is a reward which can only be given by oneself. It is the gift of the god which one is because he has ceased thinking about God. It is an augur of the god which every one will become in due time, when all that is will be beyond imagination. — Henry Miller

They tried picturing leaving Uncle Monty and living by themselves, trying to find jobs and take care of each other. It was a very lonely prospect. The Baudelaire children sat in sad silence awhile, and they were each thinking the same thing: They wished that their parents had never been killed in the fire, and that their lives had never been turned topsy-turvy the way they had. If only the Baudelaire parents were still alive, the youngsters wouldn't even have heard of Count Olaf, let alone have him settling into their home and undoubtedly making evil plants — Lemony Snicket

I felt suffocated. And alone. More alone than ever. Every year, I ostentatiously crossed out of my address book any friend who'd made a racist remark, neglected those whose only ambition was a new car and a Club Med vacation, and forgot all those who played the Lottery. I loved fishing and silence. Walking the hills. Drinking cold Cassis, Lagavulin, or Oban late into the night. I didn't talk much. Had opinions about everything. Life and death. Good and evil. I was a film buff. Loved music. I'd stopped reading contemporary novels. More than anything, I loathed half-hearted, spineless people. — Jean-Claude Izzo

No one can take less pains than to hold his tongue. Hear much, and speak little; for the tongue is the instrument of the greatest good and greatest evil that is done in the world. — Walter Raleigh

The town was more than ready to accept the window dressing that hid the ugly truth of Joe's guilt. Some shared the secrets and kept the silence. Others would not have believed if they had been told. They would not have wanted to know. As those who saw and ignored the smoke from the crematoria of Hitler's Germany, they did not want to know that their world was not as it seemed. — Judith Spencer

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

He keeps some goats, and a garden patch. In autumn he goes wandering over the island, alone, in the forests, on the mountainsides, through the valleys of the rivers. I lived there once with him, when I was younger than you are now. I didn't stay long, I hadn't the sense to stay. I went off seeking evil, and sure enough I found it ... But you come escaping evil; seeking freedom; seeking silence for a while, until you find your own way. There you will find kindness and silence, Tenar. There the lamp will burn out of the wind awhile. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Some things you cannot see or explain, but they are there, lurking.
Some things dwell in the dark: waiting ... watching ... haunting.
Sometimes evil takes on many forms, many faces.
And silence is the last thing you hear, when it's already too late.
THE SILENCE — Barry Brickey

When a tree falls it resounds with a thundering crash; and yet a whole forest grows in silence. — Jocelyn Murray

It is no little wisdom for you to keep yourself in silence and in good peace when evil words are spoken to you, and to turn your heart to God and not to be troubled with the judgment of others. — Thomas A Kempis

"Oh, ancient god, whatever your name," whispered Ahmed. "Help this lost son of a good father, this evil boy who meant no harm but slept in school, ran errands slowly, did not pray from his heart, ignored his mother, and did not hold his family in great esteem. For all this I know I must suffer. But here in the midst of silence, at the desert's heart, where even the wind knows not my name? Must I die so young? Am I to be forgotten without having been?" — Ray Bradbury

No circumstance in the world can ever prevent us from believing in God, from placing all our trust in him, from loving him with our whole heart, or from loving our neighbor. Faith, hope, and charity are absolutely free, because if they are rooted in us deeply enough, they are able to draw strength from whatever opposes them! If someone sought to prevent us from believing by persecuting us, we always would retain the option of forgiving our enemies and transforming the situation of oppression into one of greater love. If someone tried to silence our faith by killing us, our deaths would be the best possible proclamation of our faith! Love, and only love, can overcome evil by good and draw good out of evil. — Jacques Philippe

The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. — Barbara Kingsolver

Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books ... I was learning that books and diagrams can be evil things if they deaden the mind of man and make him blind or cynical before subjection of any kind. — Agnes Smedley

One great remedy against all manner of temptation, great or small, is to open the heart and lay bare its suggestion, likings, and dislikings before some spiritual adviser; for, ... the first condition which the Evil One makes with a soul, when he wants to entrap it, is silence. — Saint Francis De Sales

The devil lives in the shadow of subtle things
those things people keep hidden from others. They reside in the lies they tell themselves, in order to justify their pain or fear. It is the slight, the dig, the silence and the unspoken truth that we minimize to a passive aggressive status, as if it were a lesser evil. Integrity is not subtle. It speaks loudly, so everyone can hear and be healed. It is something you will never have to search for because it is seen and felt. — Shannon L. Alder

Our lives are so brief and unimportant. The cosmos cares nothing for us. For what we've done; Had we wrought evil instead of good. Had I chosen to abuse the Apple instead of seal it away. None of it would have mattered. There is no counting. No reckoning. No final judgement. There is simply silence. And darkness. Utter and absolute ...
-Altair — Assassins Creed

You or I might think that at least one would show courage and put up a fight. But neither you nor I have suffered as they, and even we have born witness in silence to lesser ills under less dire threat. Yet, in the face of evil, to sit silent is an even greater evil. Complacency is ever the enabler of darkest deeds; — Robert Fanney

Pride is an evil dragon; it sleeps underneath your heart and then roars when you need silence. — Jodi Picoult

The reputations of the Lord's people should be very precious in our sight ... We may ourselves one of these dark days need forbearance and silence from our brethren, let us render it cheerfully to those who require it now. Be this our family rule, and our personal bond: Speak evil of no man. — Charles Spurgeon

The person who bears and suffers evils with meekness and silence is the sum of a Christian man. — Charles Wesley

In evil times, when public virtue has left the earth, ancient writings are of little account, and no one cares to disturb the silence of the libraries. — Joseph-Arthur De Gobineau

Some representatives of monopolistic capitalism, sensing this evil in their system, have tried to silence criticism by pointing to the diffused ownership in the great corporations. They advertise, "No one owns more than 4 percent of the stock of this great company." Or they print lists of stockholders, showing that these include farmers, schoolteachers, baseball players, taxi drivers, and even babies. — Fulton J. Sheen

In a simple street you can find the whole world: You can find joy and sorrow; you can find good and evil, silence and noise; you can find all the comedies and all the tragedies! An ordinary simple street is the mirror of the whole world! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The strange thing was how quiet everything became just in that moment. Everything. All of existence, covered in a thick, still blanket of complete silence. The screeching tires and the yelling all paused. And then it happened: the white flash. It was blinding, taking away all definition of earth and sky, leaving nothing visible but the awful purity of the white. I remember that I flinched instinctively. That was all I really had time to do. Then, as if to announce my passing and that of all three-hundred-and-fourteen other souls working the midnight shift at the plant, came the roar. It was a guttural thunderous growl, like some great evil had just been released into the world. After that ... — Dennis Sharpe

Why not think that sometimes - just sometimes - you can overcome evil with silence? And let people hear their hatefulness in their own ears, without distraction. Maybe goodness is enough to expose evil for what it really is, sometimes. — Sylvain Reynard

... but anyone can shout obscenities ... Why not think that sometimes-just sometimes- you can overcome evil with silence? And let people hear their hatefulness in their ears, without distraction. Maybe goodness is enough to expose evil for what it really is, sometimes. Rather than trying to stop evil with more evil. — Sylvain Reynard

There are evil neighborhoods of noise and evil neighborhoods of silence, and Eeldrop and Appleplex preferred the latter, as being the more evil. It — T. S. Eliot

I once saw a convict who had been twenty years in prison and was being released take leave of his fellow prisoners. There were men who remembered his first coming into prison, when he was young, careless, heedless of his crime and his punishment. He went out a grey-headed, elderly man, with a sad sullen face. He walked in silence through our six barrack-rooms. As he entered each room he prayed to the ikons, and then bowing low to his fellow prisoners he asked them not to remember evil against him. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Silence rolled at me, in waves.
They are all dead, and you are free.
And you are blameless. — Joyce Carol Oates

An old man spoke to his grandson. "My child," he said. "Inside everyone there is a battle between two wolves. One is Evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, inferiority, lies, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth." The boy thought for a moment. Then he asked, "Which wolf wins?" A moment of silence passed before the old man replied. And then he said, "The one you feed." - Native American Folk Tale — Christine Woodward

You see, Risa, survival is a dance between our needs and our consciences. When the need is great enough, and the music loud enough, we can stomp conscience into the ground.'
Risa closes her eyes. She knows the dance ...
'It's the way of the world,' Divan continues. 'Look at unwinding, society's grand gavotte of denial. There will, no doubt, come a time when people look to one another and say, 'My God, what have we done?' But I don't believe it will happen any time soon. Until then, the dance must have music; the chorus must have its voice. Give it that voice, Risa. Play for me.'
But Risa's fingers offer him nothing, and the Orgao Organico holds the obdurate, unyielding silence of the grave. — Neal Shusterman

More rooted in logic was the silence of God. In the world there was evil and much of it resulted from doubt, from an honest confusion among men of good will. Would a reasonable God refuse to end it? Not finally reveal Himself? Not speak? "Lord, give us a sign ... " The raising of Lazarus was dim in the distant past. No one now living had heard his laughter. And so why not a sign? — William Peter Blatty

If you see oppression, violence, injustice and evil deeds, unzip your silence and uncaring indifference, do something and act against all these unethical instances." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from my novel, If I Could Tell You — Angelica Hopes

So. How to "Resist Not Evil" Meditation - Sit every day and find the silence inside yourself. In this silence, there is peace without anger. There is no evil, no attachment to revenge or righteous indignation. With practice, you learn to identify yourself with this place. It becomes natural to master anger, an energy like any other. When this happens, evil begins to release you from its hold. Contemplation - The mind plays a large — Deepak Chopra

The struggle for power had reached a new stage; it was fought with scientific formulas. The weapons vanished in the abyss like fleeting images, like pictures one throws into the fire ...
When new models were displayed to the masses at the great parades on Red Square in Moscow or elsewhere, the crowds stood in reverent silence and then broke into jubilant shouts of triumph ...
Though the display was continual, in this silence and these shouts something evil, old as time, manifested itself in man, who is an outsmarter and setter of traps. Invisible, Cain and Tubalcain marched past in the parade of phantoms. — Ernst Junger

There's a power that comes with silence. I had grown to fear the unsaid thing. So it felt like a release to say it-to admit that the risk wasn't just inside our walls-it was inside my skin. I was willing to claw, scratch, and bleed until I'd found it. — Ally Carter

There was the kind of silence there might have been on the day before Creation.
Adam stood smiling at the two of them, a small figure perfectly poised exactly between Heaven and Hell.
Crowley grabbed Aziraphale's arm. "You know what happened?" he hissed excitedly. "He was left alone! He grew up human! He's not Evil Incarnate or Good Incarnate, he's just...a human incarnate- — Neil Gaiman

I don' mean to be at all ... St. Francis of Assisi or something, but anyone can shout obscenities. Why should I become like her? Why not think that sometimes- just sometimes- you can overcome evil with silence? And let people hear their hatefulness in their own ears, without distraction. Maybe goodness is enough to expose evil for what it really is, sometimes. Rather than trying to stop evil with more evil. Not that I'm good. I don't think I'm good. — Sylvain Reynard

The multiplication of evil in a society is a result of the silence of good people.It is wonderful to be good and no matter how good, its application is more profitable. — James C. Uwandu

The doctor from the mainland came and went. Silence settled over the island again, like a displaced curtain falling back in thickened, heavier folds. For there was a different quality in the silence now. It had tasted something, rich food on which it had long been thinly rationed. Shadowy things were trooping up, called by that scent of blood, like flies that smell carrion. They were not strangers to the old house; they had been ill-fed and at a distance, now they were hungry and avid and near. — Evangeline Walton

In bed, I steal moments of tenderness when sex has finally exhausted me to the point where I'm too bone weary to fret anymore about the enormous capacity for evil that's taken up squatter's rights inside me. I touch him, put all those things I don't say into my hands as I trace the red and black tattoos on his skin, the sharp planes and hollows of his face, bury my hands in his dark hair. He watches me in silence when I do, eyes dark, unfathomable.
I sometimes wake up to find he's pulled me close to him and is holding me, spooned into my back with his face in my hair, and those hands that don't speak like mine don't speak move over my skin and tell me I'm cherished, honored, seen. — Karen Marie Moning

Philosophy finds talkativeness a disease very difficult and hard to cure. For its remedy, conversation, requires hearers: but talkative people hear nobody, for they are ever prating. And the first evil this inability to keep silence produces is an inability to listen. — Plutarch

When we are happy to turn from evil because it is ugly, and causes us distress, then we condone it and become party to its continuance. Little by little, we become as guilty of it as those who commit the act - because we have told them by our silence that it is acceptable. — Anne Perry

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
[Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927)] — Louis D. Brandeis

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.
When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!"
When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer. — Bertolt Brecht

Naoko took her left hand from her pocket and squeezed my hand. 'Don't you worry,' she said. 'You'll be O.K. You could go running all around here in the middle of the night and you'd never fall into the well. And as long as I stick with you, I won't fall in, either.'
Never?'
Never!'
How can you be so sure?'
I just know,' she said, increasing her grip on my hand and continuing on for a ways in silence. 'I know these things. I'm always right. It's got nothing to do with logic: I just feel it. For example, when I'm really close to you like this, I'm not the least bit scared. Nothing dark or evil could ever tempt me.'
Well, that answers that,' I said. 'All you have to do is stay with me like this all the time. — Haruki Murakami

Silence promotes the presence of God, prevents many harsh and proud words, and suppresses many dangers in the way of ridiculing or harshly judging our neighbors ... If you are faithful in keeping silence when it is not necessary to speak, God will preserve you from evil when it is right for you to talk. — Francois Fenelon