Silence And Knowledge Quotes & Sayings

A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight. (Alexander Hamilton's 'thesis on discretion' written to his son James shortly before his fatal duel with Burr.) — Ron Chernow

As you know, shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances. It is a statement so correct that it does not have to be bold, so poignant it does not have to be pretty, so true it does not have to be real. Shibumi is understanding, rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence. In demeanor, it is modesty without pudency. In art, where the spirit of shibumi takes the form of sabi, it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. In philosophy, where shibumi emerges as wabi, it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming. And in the personality of a man, it is ... how does one say it? Authority without domination? Something like that. — Trevanian

By and large over time, pain turns to grief, grief turns to silence, and silence turns to lonesomeness, as vast and bottomless as the dark oceans ... You think you cannot live anymore. You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the lover who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere. — Elif Shafak

Whenever you feel me,
just call me
With the silence of your soul,
and with the softness of your love.
I will be with you,
With the magic of my love.
You may not see me,
But you will feel me.
You will hear my song
In the depth of your heart. — Debasish Mridha

Silence is the great teacher and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that come from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence. — Deepak Chopra

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art. — Kahlil Gibran

Finally Bill Mixter would lower his head, lay his bow upon the strings, and draw out the first notes of a tune, and the others would come in behind him. The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being. They would play some tunes they had learned on the radio, but their knowledge was far older than that and they played too the music that was native to the place, or that the people of the place were native to. Just the names of the tunes were a kind of music; they cal l back the music to my mind still, after so many years: "Sand Riffle," "Last Gold Dollar," "Billy in the Low Ground," "Gate to Go Through," and a lot of others. "A fiddle, now, is an atmospheric thing," said Burley Coulter. The music was another element filling the room and pouring out through the cracks. When at last they'd had their fill and had gone away, the shop felt empty, the silence larger than before. — Wendell Berry

When I was looking at the moon, I saw your eyes looking at me. I felt lights of love softly touching me, in the silence I heard your sweet music of joy, and then I got lost in your love. — Debasish Mridha

As I wandered around the room, with Sachiko by my side, I began to think how much we need space in those we love, space enough to accommodate growth and possibility. Knowledge must leave room for mystery; intimacy, taken too far, was the death of imagination. Keeping some little distance from her was, I thought, a way of keeping an open space, a silence for the imagination to fill.
"At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things," Thoreau had written, "we require that all things be mysterious and unexplainable. — Pico Iyer

We live in Secret. We live in Silence. And we live Forever ... — Luis Marques

Do I have to go back?" to "Why did I get to come to this place of silence?" I realized that the blessing I had received from this experience was the knowledge that deep internal peace is accessible to anyone at any time. I believe the experience of Nirvana exists in the consciousness of our right hemisphere, and that at any moment, we can choose to hook into that part of our brain. With this — Jill Bolte Taylor

I suffered unbearable torture in silence, weeping internallyat the sad turn of events, blaming myself bitterly again and again for having delved into the supernatural without first acquiring a fuller knowledge of the subject and providing against the dangers and risks of the path. — Gopi Krishna

Stranger: 'Are not thought and speech the same, with this exception, that what is called thought is the unuttered conversation of the soul with herself?
Theatetus: Quite true.
Stranger: But the stream of thought which flows through the lips and is audible is called speech?
Theatetus: True.
Stranger: And we know that there exists in speech ...
Theatetus: What exists?
Stranger: Affirmation
Theatetus: Yes, we know it. — Plato

For as men have fists and heads to defend themselves, so women have a gentleness of silence about them, a barrier built of things of the spirit, of pain, of quiet, of helplessness, of grace, of all that is beautiful and womanly an equal part, given to them because they are women in defense of their womaness. And this barrier a man will find against him to turn aside his male attack, keep his arms pinned, stop his mouth, cool his eyes, reduce his heat and restrain his idle imaginings. This barrier it is that women who are women keep always at a height, coming from behind it only when, with knowledge and in light, they trust. You shall see it in their eyes. — Richard Llewellyn

It is better to sit alone than in company with the bad, and it is better still to sit with the good than alone. It is better to speak to a seeker of knowledge than to remain silent, but silence is better than idle words. — Muhammad

When I listen and enjoy the deepest silence I hear the sound of universal love and lose myself completely. — Debasish Mridha

In the morning, celebrate the beauty and warmth of sun light,
in the evening, celebrate the song of silence and love of night. — Debasish Mridha

Shibumi is understanding, rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence. In demeanor, it is modesty without pudency. In art, where the spirit of shibumi takes the form of sabi, it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. In philosophy, where shibumi emerges as wabi, it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming. And in the personality of a man, it is ... how does one say it? Authority without domination? Something like that." Nicholai's imagination was galvanized by the concept of shibumi. No other ideal had ever touched him so. "How does one achieve this shibumi, sir?" "One does not achieve it, one ... discovers it. And only a few men of infinite refinement ever do that. Men like my friend Otake-san." "Meaning that one must learn a great deal to arrive at shibumi?" "Meaning, rather, that one must pass through knowledge and arrive at simplicity. — Trevanian

In the depth of silence
be speechless
to listen the song of life,
song of creation of life,
primordial song.
Be silent, and listen to your heart.
Can you hear
The song of life,
The song of love,
The song of creation? — Debasish Mridha

Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Our lives are so short and during that short period there is nothing to learn about the whole field of the psyche, which is the movement of memory; we can only observe it. Observe without any movement of thought, observe without time, without past knowledge, without the observer who is the essence of the past. Just watch. Watch those clouds shaping and reshaping, watch the trees, the little birds. It is all part of life. When you watch attentively, with diligence, there is nothing to learn; there is only that vast space, silence and emptiness, which is all-consuming energy. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The people's silence is a tyrant's greatest advocate. The less captives talked, the less they knew; the less they knew, the more they feared; and the more they feared, the more easily others could manipulate them to their own ends, the more easily the captives could be controlled. — John Kramer

While my sister and I were reminded we did not cause this pain, it was knowing that because we broke our silence about what had been done to us, our parents were hurting. That knowledge was hard on us. — Erin Merryn

Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? — T. S. Eliot

If we can't solve the problem, resolve the difference, then embrace the diversity, bring the silence, time will solve the problem and peace will prevail. — Debasish Mridha

And as they stood in silence before her, prayed again. "Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life." Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey. "Please let Yvonne have her dream
dream?
of a new life with me
please let me believe that all that is not an abominable self-deception," he tried ... "Please let me make her happy, deliver me from this dreadful tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the truth. Teach me to love again, to love life." That wouldn't do either ... "Where is love? Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost.
Let me be truly lonely, that I may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it's only together, if it's only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world!" he cried in his heart. — Malcolm Lowry

We drove in a kind of wholesome silence, carrying our whole long marriage, all the hope and kindness that it represented, with us. What it felt like was sitting in Sunday school singing "Jesus loves me," sitting in the little chairs, surrounded by sunlight and bright drawings, and having those first inklings of doubt, except that doubt presents itself simply as added knowledge, something new, for the moment, to set beside what is already known. — Jane Smiley

Oh yes, I have learned much from Tremorlor, and so assume a like strategy. Silence, a faint mocking smile suggesting I know more than I do, an air of mystery, yes, and fell knowledge. None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions! — Steven Erikson

Be good and kind to yourself in silence when you are all alone, that is all that matters. — Debasish Mridha

To be free from ignorance you need knowledge. The mind should turn inward. Silence takes the mind inward and helps you to recognize who you are. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

THE TRUTH OF THE VERY SMALL
When he is born, a baby's head is filled with the knowledge of space. The circumference of his skull is as infinite as the twirlings of the universe. His eyes look out with the blur of eyes which see for all species. He has remembered his own nature from past patterns. Now his heart beats through rock, sky, oceans. He feels the silence and the sound all around the world beneath his skin.
We all hold somewhere deep within us the truth we accepted in innocence. The seas, the forests, the soil, the atmosphere, are all vital parts of an ongoing system. By harming any part of it we must ultimately harm ourselves. It is that simple. — Jay Woodman

When a not-doing comes upon you, and there is no reflection of yourself to be found, many things can and will be related back to you as knowledge, yet you have no way of knowing how you assimilated that wisdom. — Lujan Matus

A mode of knowledge rooted in silence and intuitive insight which gives meaning to life but which cannot be explained in rational terms. — Karen Armstrong

The GhostWalker Creed:
We are the GhostWalkers, we life in the shadows. The sea, the earth, and the air are our domain. No fallen comrade will be left behind. We are loyalty and honor bound. We are invisible to our enemies and we destroy them where we find them. We believe in justice and we protect our country and those unable to protect themselves. What goes unseen, unheard, and unknown are GhostWalkers. There is honor in the shadows and it is us. We move in complete silence whether in jungle or desert. We walk among our enemy unseen and unheard. Striking without sound and scatter to the winds before they have knowledge of our existance. We gather information and wait with endless patience for that perfect moment to deliver swift justice. We are both merciful and merciless. We are relentless and implacable in our resolve. We are the GhostWalkers and the night is ours. — Christine Feehan

The experience of silence alone is the real and perfect knowledge. — Ramana Maharshi

The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one's clothes in a community of blind men. — Joseph Conrad

The progress of the sciences toward theories of fundamental unity, cosmic symmetry (as in the unified field theory) - how do such theories differ, in the end, from that unity which Plato called "unspeakable" and "indiscribable," the holistic knowledge shared by so many peoples of the earth, Christians included, before the advent of the industrial revolution made new barbarians of the peoples of the West? In the United States, before spiritualist foolishness at the end of the last century confused mysticism with "the occult" and tarnished both, William James wrote a master work of metaphysics; Emerson spoke of "the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One . . ."; Melville referred to "that profound silence, that only voice of God"; Walt Whitman celebrated the most ancient secret, that no God could be found "more divine than yourself. — Peter Matthiessen

We think we know the ones we love, and though we should not be surprised to find that we don't, it is heartbreak nonetheless. It is the hardest kind of knowledge, not just about another but about ourselves. To see our lives as a fiction we have written and believed. Silence and lies. The sensation I felt that evening
that I did not know my Holland, did not know myself, that it was perhaps impossible to know a single soul on earth
it was a fearful loneliness. — Andrew Sean Greer

Truth is not found by knowledge, it is found by silence. And knowledge is noisy. — Rajneesh

There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.
And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.
And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.
In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence. — Kahlil Gibran

Cultures have long heard wisdom in non-human voices: Apollo, god of music, medicine and knowledge, came to Delphi in the form of a dolphin. But dolphins, which fill the oceans with blipping and chirping, and whales, which mew and caw in ultramarine jazz - a true rhapsody in blue - are hunted to the edge of silence. — Jay Griffiths

A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers - like a bee where there are no flowers - a useless, inscrutable destiny. — Fernando Pessoa

Why," he was saying, "why should one not tolerate this life, since so little suffices to deprive one of it? So little brings it into being, so little brightens it, so little blights it, so little bears it away. Otherwise, who would tolerate the blows of fate and the humiliations of a successful career, the swindling of grocers, the prices of butchers, the water of milkmen, the irritation of parents, the fury of teachers, the bawling of sergeant-majors, the turpitude of the beasts, the lamentations of the dead-beats, the silence of infinite space, the smell of cauliflower or the passivity of the wooden horses on a merry-g0-round, were it not for his knowledge that the bad and proliferative behaviour of certain minute cells (gesture) or the trajectory of a bullet traced by an involuntary, irresponsible, anonymous individual might unexpectedly come and cause all these cares to evaporate into the blue heavens. — Raymond Queneau

Happiness will come
Today, tomorrow and every year
Now, then and every moment
For if, we learn to love, care and share.
Happiness will come
To fill our heart with kindness
It is a gift from the universe
To touch our life with joyful silence.
Happiness will come
For if we know, wealth and splendors are illusion
But attainment of certain mental state,
And Unconditional love is a real possession. — Debasish Mridha

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. — T. S. Eliot

Tranquility, serenity, and beauty of nature taught me how to find happiness in life and in the silence of eternity. — Debasish Mridha

Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn't exist at all: awareness. Nothing more than that. Just awareness - a vague, ethereal sense of being. Being ... but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future - only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception ... — Robert J. Sawyer

You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, "I am just going outside and may be some time." The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins. — Annie Dillard

Deep within our souls we know that God exists and that He has given His law to us. We seek to suppress this knowledge in order to escape God's commands. But no matter how hard we try, we cannot silence this inner voice. It can be muffled but not destroyed. — R.C. Sproul

Only when the mind is tranquil-through self-knowledge and not through imposed self-discipline-only then, in that tranquillity, in that silence, can reality come into being. It is only then that there can be bliss, that there can be creative action. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Of all silences I had encountered this was the gravest and most inevitable: not the silence of secrets, but of knowing. — Emmi Itaranta

Not only a truer knowledge, but a greater power comes to one in the quietude and silence of a mind that, instead of bubbling on the surface, can go to its own depths and listen. — Sri Aurobindo

You see how I live: shadows and silence, leaving things as I find them because I have no reason to disturb them. But there are things that I have known, even though I never wished to know them and cannot give them a name. — Thomas Ligotti

What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds? — Kathy Acker

The Reed Flute's Work
I say to the reed flute, You do the work,
yet you know sweet secrets too.
You share the Friend's breathing.
What could you need from me?
The reed replies, Knowledge is total
destruction. I say, Burn me completely then
and leave no knowing.
How could I, when it's knowledge that leads us?
But this knowledge has lost compassion
and grown disgusted with itself.
It has forgotten about silence and emptiness.
A reed flute has nine holes
and is a model of human consciousness,
beheaded, though still in love with lips.
This is your disgrace, this moaning.
Weep for the sounds you make. — Rumi

Am fully convinced that it is impossible for a woman, even if she were born close to a throne, to acquire before the age of five-and-twenty the encyclopaedic knowledge of trifles, the practice of manoeuvring, the important small things, the musical tones and harmony of coloring, the angelic bedevilments and innocent cunning, the speech and the silence, the seriousness and the banter, the wit and the obtuseness, the diplomacy and the ignorance which make up the perfect lady. — Honore De Balzac

When the sun of consciousness first shone upon me, behold a miracle! The stock of my young life which had perished, steeped in the waters of knowledge grew again, budded again, was sweet again with the blossoms of childhood. Down in the depths of my being, I cried, 'it is good to be alive!' I held out two trembling hands to life, and in vain silence would impose dumbness upon me henceforth! The world to which I awoke was still mysterious; but there was hope and love and God in it, and nothing else mattered. Is it not possible that our entrance into heaven may be like this experience of mine? — Helen Keller

Franklin was worried that his fondness for conversation and eagerness to impress made him prone to "prattling, punning and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company." Knowledge, he realized, "was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue." So in the Junto, he began to work on his use of silence and gentle dialogue. — Walter Isaacson

The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth or the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man's name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That's how life goes on; protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame. — M.L. Stedman

Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her. — Iain Pears

a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, — Susan Sontag

Flowers grows in silence, quietly, slowly, passionately, with great love and with all its power just perfectly. — Debasish Mridha

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It's the silence, sure, but it's also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It's the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion. — Deb Caletti

Death was a thief that always wore a mask. Accident, disease, stillbirths, old age, natural causes, war, murder. It existed in the shivering silence between tolls of a bell. It stole everything away while it left its mark, a dark knowledge that lingered at the back of smiling eyes, a hesitation between thought and action in times of danger, a heaviness that tunneled wormholes into happy memories. — Thea Harrison

Last night as your breathing
settled into sleep
what I heard was the half-forgotten sound,
the velvet rush and hiss,
the automatic click
as the record player's arm runs out,
is brushed away
at the record's centre,
the pulse of its subsiding
oddly comforting.
33 1/3 rpm.
The knowledge that when the music ends,
there will not be silence. — John Knowles

But the greater knowledge that now lived in the peaceful silence of my heart was: in love there is
truth.
And the truth that love had taught me was you can only be strong once you are brave enough to
break, and that pain makes more room for love within. I was grateful for it all, because that was the
beautiful balance of life — Mia Sheridan

Practice silence and you will acquire silent knowledge. In this silent knowledge is a computing system that is far more precise and far more accurate and far more powerful than anything that is contained in the boundaries of rational thought. — Deepak Chopra

The truth is silent. The truth doesn't come with words. It's something that I just know; it's something that I can feel without words, and it's called silent knowledge. — Miguel Angel Ruiz

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies. — Werner Heisenberg

When the moon kisses the stas in the silence with her lights of love, my heart dances with ecstasy and beauty of life. — Debasish Mridha