Silence Within Quotes & Sayings

For all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams. — Iain Banks

How do we meditate silently? Just by not talking, just by not using outer words, we are not doing silent meditation. Silent meditation is totally different. When we start meditating in silence, right from the beginning we feel the bottom of a sea within us and without. The life of activity movement and restlessness is on the surface, but deep below, underneath our human life, there is poise and silence. So, either we shall imagine this sea of silence within us or we shall feel that we are nothing but a sea of poise itself. — Sri Chinmoy

Once this had been the life I'd wanted. Even chosen. Now, though, I couldn't believe that there had been a time when this kind of monotony and silence, this most narrow of existences, had been preferable. Then again, once, I'd never known anything else...
My mother had to know I was unhappy. But it didn't matter: all she cared about was that I was her Macy again, the one she'd come to depend on, always within earshot or reach. I came to work early, sat up straight at my desk and endured the monotony of answering phones and greeting potential homebuyers with a smile on my face. After dinner, I spent my hour and a half of free time alone, doing accepted activities. When I came home afterwards, my mother w ould be waiting for me, stickingher head out of her office to verify that, yes. I was just where I was supposed to be. And I was. I was also miserable.
~Macy, pg 306 — Sarah Dessen

Hour of Stars (1920) The round silence of night, one note on the stave of the infinite. Ripe with lost poems, I step naked into the street. The blackness riddled by the singing of crickets: sound, that dead will-o'-the-wisp, that musical light perceived by the spirit. A thousand butterfly skeletons sleep within my walls. A wild crowd of young breezes over the river. — Federico Garcia Lorca

We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy's fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, under him the whole time. Your treasure
your perfection
is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the buy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity. — Graham Greene

Well, life isn't cheap. It's the greatest mystery of any millennium, and television needs to do all it can to broadcast that ... to show and tell what the good in life is all about.
But how do we make goodness attractive? By doing whatever we can do to bring courage to those whose lives move near our own
by treating our 'neighbor' at least as well as we treat ourselves and allowing that to inform everything that we produce.
Who in your life has been such a servant to you? Who has helped you love the good that grows within you? Let's just take ten seconds to think of some of those people who have loved us and wanted what was best for us in life, those who have encouraged us to become who we are tonight - just ten seconds of silence.
No matter where they are, either here or in heaven, imagine how pleased those people must be to know that you thought of them right now. — Fred Rogers

The round silence of night,
one note on the stave
of the infinite.

Ripe with lost poems,
I step naked into the street.
The blackness riddled
by the singing of crickets:
sound,
that dead
will-o'-the-wisp,
that musical light
perceived
by the spirit.

A thousand butterfly skeletons
sleep within my walls.

A wild crowd of young breezes
over the river.

- Hour of Stars (1920) — Federico Garcia Lorca

Each poem holds the voice of a moment.
Held within, they are contained, damned to silence;
released, they fly into the world to find a new heart and a new home within,
where they will speak again. — Noa Daniels

From the olive-strewn forum, one could see the village down below. Not a sound came from it; wisps of smoke rose in the limpid air. The sea also lay silent, as if breathless beneath the unending shower of cold, glittering light. From the Chenoua, a distant cock crow alone sang the fragile glory of the day. Across the ruins, as far as one could see, there were nothing but pitted stones and absinthe plants, trees and perfect columns in the transparence of the crystal air. It was as if the morning stood still, as if the sun had stopped for an immeasurable moment. In this light and silence, years of night and fury melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself, as if my heart had long been stopped and was now gently beginning to beat again. — Albert Camus

SORTING HAT: "Albus Potter."
He puts his hat on Albus's head - and this time he seems to take longer - almost as if he too is confused.
"SLYTHERIN!"
There's a silence.
A perfect, profound silence.
One that sits low, twists a bit, and has damage within it. — J.K. Rowling

She listens, determined to locate the trapped bird that had called out from within the madness of suffering. But there is only silence now, not even a halting fragment. Ali! Ali! A dervish, having renounced dealings with all words except that one, never utters another, in any circumstance ... The sentence enters her mind from a book she had been looking at earlier. Her gaze is drifting across the sky where the moon sits in a great cold ring as she recalls more and more words. Only one thing matters, only one word. If we speak, it is because we have not found that thing, nor shall find it. — Nadeem Aslam

The inner being is not only the meditative quality within, the inner silence and emptiness, it is the door to the whole. — Swami Dhyan Giten

Silence descended on the house. [....] Amma must have sensed that this was the sort of silence that, left unchallenged, could consume the family from within. — Vivek Shanbhag

One of the greatest lessons we can learn in life is how to keep mute when the boiling ring of anger is dropped within us — Ikechukwu Izuakor

When the angel spoke, God awoke in the heart of this girl of Nazareth and moved within her like a giant. He stirred and opened His eyes and her soul and saw that in containing Him she contained the world besides. The Annunciation was not so much a vision as an earthquake in which God moved the universe and unsettled the spheres, and the beginning and end of all things came before her in her deepest heart. And far beneath the movement of this silent cataclysm she slept in the infinite tranquility of God, and God was a child curled up who slept in her and her veins were flooded with His wisdom which is night, which is starlight, which is silence. And her whole being was embraced in Him whom she embraced and they became tremendous silence." -Thomas Merton — Thomas Merton

We've worn our words to death,
when now I say: my love,
nothing happens, absolutely nothing.
And yet, before the words were spent,
I'm certain
that everything trembled
at the mere murmur of your name
in the silence of my heart.
Now we have nothing to give.
There is nothing within you
that asks me for water.
The past is useless as a rag.
And I've told you already: the words are spent.
Good-bye. — Eugenio De Andrade

I do very little on-camera acting, so within a phrase as a voice actor you have to know how to convey when someone is 95 years old or 19 years old ... When I was the lead singer of the California Raisins commercials there was a traditional actor there as well and he would do all these body movements without saying anything because he was "acting." And the only acting the microphone picked up on was silence. — Jim Cummings

I learned something about you today."
That wins his full attention. He draws me into the fathomless depths of his eyes. "What would that be?"
"Every time you try to do the right thing, you get screwed."
My observation is met with silence. He scoops up my other necklace, closing the key, heart, and ring within his fist.
I take a shallow breath, heartbeat stumbling as I try to read him.
"So it's a battle to make that choice, yeah?"
-Unhinged, pg 351-2 — A.G. Howard

Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. — Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

People move on quicker than I can comprehend. People forget you within days, they take new pictures to put on Facebook and they don't read your messages. They keep on moving forward and shove you to the side because you make more mistakes than you should. — Alice Oseman

Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything . . . It is the presence of time, undisturbed. It can be felt within the chest. Silence nurtures our nature, our human nature, and lets us know who we are. Left with a more receptive mind and a more attuned ear, we become better listeners not only to nature but to each other. Silence can be carried like embers from a fire. Silence can be found, and silence can find you. Silence can be lost and also recovered. But silence cannot be imagined, although most people think so. To experience the soul-swelling wonder of silence, you must hear it. — Gordon Hempton

Augustine of Hippo said, Let us leave a little room for reflection in our lives, room too for silence. Let us look within ourselves and see whether there is some delightful hidden place inside where we can be free of noise and argument. Let us hear the Word of God in stillness and perhaps we will then come to understand it. — Shane Claiborne

Dare to Dream
Yes, if you can dare to dream.
Surely you can catch the sunlight's beam.
While all else seems to fail.
Truth shall forever prevail.
(Copyright excerpts from the poem and published poetry book 'From the Silence Within — Madhavi Sood

Small sands the mountain, moments make the year, And trifles, life. - Young. The smallest hair throws its shadow. - Goethe. He that despiseth small things shall fall little by little. - Ecclesiastes. It is the little rift within the lute, That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all. - Tennyson. "A pebble in the streamlet scant Has turned the course of many a river: A dewdrop on the baby plant Has warped the giant oak forever. — Orison Swett Marden

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

The more you openly name your struggles, the less people can use your silence as a back door to blackmail you, to sabotage your leadership, or to subvert relationships within the organization. — Dan B. Allender

To expose our hearts to truth and consistently refuse or neglect to obey the impulses it arouses is to stymie the motions of life within us and, if persisted in, to grieve the Holy Spirit into silence. — A.W. Tozer

Do you want a half-truth or truth?" "Truth." "Then you will have to trust me." His voice was suddenly softer than the fire sounds, melting into the silence within the stones. "Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope. Trust me." Morgon — Patricia A. McKillip

You need to trust
To surrender
To ask for guidance
Go within for the answers
They're within you
You have the answers
All you need do is ask — Karen Hackel

A spiritual retreat is medicine for soul starvation. Through silence, solitary practice, and simple living, we begin to fill the empty reservoir. This lifts the veils, dissolves the masks, and creates space within for the feelings of forgiveness, compassion, and loving kindness that are so often blocked. — David A. Cooper

I should've prayed that day. Maybe, just maybe, a few hours ago would've been different. Who am I kidding; everything led up to that moment. This is the first time I have been in the hospital. I am speechless. The cool sheets rest upon my lifeless body. The cold silence within the room carries the beeps echoing from the heart monitor. — T.K. Ware

It is the little rift within the lute That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

Take some time off to go within, in silence. With that, your charm becomes eternal, your love becomes unconditional & great strength arises. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

It is one thing to get all the notes right; any number of unsocialized conservatory prodigies can do that. It is another thing to play the thoughts within the notes, the light around them, the darkness behind them, the silence at the end of the phrase. That is what inspires awe. — Alex Ross

The chains and the silence, which should have bound her deep within herself, which should have smothered her, strangled her, on the contrary freed her from herself. — Pauline Reage

Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream. — Eric Hoffer

If only you would understand the silent speech and the real pain within the innermost man of they that suffer in silence, you would never keep silent to their suffering. So many people can't speak everything about how they are suffering for the sake of dignity and confidentiality. Though they smile, they smile out of a deep pain within. When you look at someone suffering, just see how he is suffering and in so far as you can, be the joy to the innermost man of the person to the best of your ability. Don't wait for his words, just look and see! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Let us never tire, therefore, of seeking the Lord - of letting ourselves be sought by him - of tending over our relationship with him in silence and prayerful listening. Let us keep our gaze fixed on him, the center of time and history; let us make room for his presence within us. — Pope Francis

In silence, we hear the voice of intuition's guidance; coming from that place within where it already resides. — Transform Publishing

He recognizes voices within silence. (of Max Sebald) — Patti Smith

Life is one kind of sound. Death is another kind of sound. Those who cannot hear the sound of death think death is silence. Death is not silence, it is just another kind of sound, but may not within the hearing range of a normal ear. — Jaggi Vasudev

The area became known as the Zone of Silence because normal radios do not work within the 1,500 square mile area. Some sort of interference generated within the zone jams the signals. — David Hatcher Childress

Prayer within breath is silence, love within infinity is silence, Wisdom without word is silence, compassion without aim is silence, action without doer is silence, smiling with all existence is silence — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Even a priest may doubt. Even a prophet may know terror. Aeron Damphair reached within himself for his god and discovered only silence. — George R R Martin

If as an adult I have scolded and then silenced the child within me, I contend that I am neither an adult nor a child. Rather, I am just plain ignorant. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

In its outward manifestation, meditation appears to involve either stopping, by parking the body in a stillness that suspends activity, or giving oneself over to flowing movement. In either case, it is an embodiment of wise attention, an inward gesture undertaken for the most part in silence, a shift from doing to simply being. It is an act that may at first seem artificial but that we soon discover, if we keep at it, is ultimately one of pure love for the life unfolding within us and around us. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

From darkness; take me unto Light.
O God! Help me today, make my maiden flight.
From sorrow; give me the strength to break. And help me to love and to care.
From darkness take me unto Light.
O God! Hear my prayers and let in the sunlight.
(excerpts of my poem from my book 'From the Silence Within') — Madhavi Sood

A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. — Martin Luther King Jr.

He didn't call me for a few weeks. This was customary within our friendship, confide and retreat, but I wondered. I wondered if perhaps our last conversation had been an overture. Not the conversation, exactly, but the silences within it. There had been many dark pits of tea-sipping silence; looking back, I could imagine placing my hand on his hand while kneeling in one of these dark pits. And in such a pit could one even be sure what one was doing? One might seek solace in a friend and literally go inside this friend to get the solace; and the friend, being old and familiar, might give especially good solace. — Miranda July

We were once enwombed in the earth and the silence of the body remembers that dark, inner longing. Fashioned from clay, we carry the memory of the earth. Ancient, forgotten things stir within our hearts, memories from the time before the mind was born. Within us are depths that keep watch. These are depths that no words can trawl or light unriddle. — John O'Donohue

Did you catch the time-of-great-suffering thing?"
Her expression softened. "Can you just make sure I'm not around when it happens?"
"No can do," I said, strolling back to my office with a negating wave of my hand. "If I have to suffer, then so does everyone else within a ten-mile radius."
She pursed her lips. "What ever happened to taking one for the team?"
"Was never much of a team player."
"Sacrificing yourself for the greater good?"
"Not that into human sacrifice."
"Suffering in silence?"
I stopped and turned back to her, my eyes narrowing accusingly. "If I have to suffer, I'll be screaming your name at the top of my lungs the whole time. You'll be able to hear me all the way to Jersey, mark my words."
- Charley to Cookie — Darynda Jones

Every answer you ever need lies within your own silence.. — Ian Tucker

God is our true Friend, who always gives us the counsel and comfort we need. Our danger lies in resisting Him; so it is essential that we acquire the habit of hearkening to His voice, or keeping silence within, and listening so as to lose nothing of what He says to us. — Francois Fenelon

Your treasure - your perfection - is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. The kundalini shakti - the supreme energy of the divine - will take you there. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are! — Alfred De Musset

O Lord, make my soul a sanctuary, a fortress within. That no one and nothing can disturb. A place of calm, silence, and serenity, untouched by the outside world. The soul that Allah (swt) calls al-nafs al mutmaina (the reassured soul). (Qur'an 89:27) The soul that Allah (swt) calls back saying: — Yasmin Mogahed

Certain coincidence is wonderful. Certain meetings are memorable. Sometimes you meet some people for just a moment and they leave indelible footprints on your mind. They give you the reasons to ponder over and over. They become your food for thought. Though they go, their presence is felt within the innermost of the heart and the soul; especially when such people were a reason for a smile, or they were a perfect fit for a vacuum or probably they were a heavenly sent or maybe they were an epitome of a great union; when their light could shine to brighten the dark side of our lives; when they knew how to arouse interest even in the face of dull atmosphere; when they did understand silence and know the value and power of words; when even their absence is felt more than their presence. You can't just forget about such people. Though they leave, they live within our hearts, mind, body and soul. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

An amber sunset, a flowing river, a snow capped mountain, a beautiful heart, a calm mind, deep eyes, the moon, the earth and the sky - they are all silent. It's the words that give them meaning, decipher their essence and share their message. — Rashmit Kalra

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

In that sense at least the rector of Saint Barnabas, a man named Robert MacFarlane, did not strike me as evangelical at all. His sermons were not seamless and armor plated but had spaces in them, spaces of silence as if he needed those spaces to find deep within himself what he was going to say next, as if he was giving the rest of us space to think for a moment about what he had just been trying to say last. There was never any doubt in my mind but that the faith he was laying out before us was a faith that, even as he spoke it, he was drawing out of the raw stuff of his own life. He spoke very quietly, and the church he spoke in was not brilliantly lit but full of shadow, full of secrets. — Frederick Buechner

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers.
And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see. — James Salter

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

Classical Sanskrit prose writers made very long sentences like this: "Lost in the forest and in thought, bent upon death and at the root of a tree, fallen upon calamity and her nurse's bosom, parted from her husband and happiness, burnt with the fierce sunshine and the woes of widowhood, her mouth closed with silence as well as by her hand, held fast by her companions as well as by grief, I saw her with her kindred and her graces all gone, her ears and her soul left bare, her ornaments and her aims abandoned, her bracelets and her hopes broken, her companions and the needle-like grass-spears clinging round her feet, her eyes and her beloved fixed within her bosom, her sighs and her hair long, her limbs and her merits exhausted, her aged attendants and her streams of tears falling down at her feet...." and it goes on. — Abraham Eraly

Yet a mysterious gate lay open within her shadow; and all my flesh was aware of black pathways and hovels and the silence one observes when the dead are near. — Joe Bousquet

The silence of a convent at night is the silence of the grave. Too far removed from the busy world without for external sounds to penetrate the thick walls, whilst within no slamming door, nor wandering foot, nor sacrilegious voice breaks in upon the stillness, the slightest noise strikes upon the ear with a fearful distinctness. ("The Monk's Story") — Catherine Crowe

Find where the sound ends and silence begins. Then exist in that moment, for there will you find your secret centre of being, the perfect place of peace within yourself. — Raymond E. Feist

Lately I have come to believe that an as yet undiscovered human need and even a property of matter is the desire for revelation. The truth within us has a way of coming out despite all conscious efforts to conceal it. I have heard stories from those in the generation after the war, all speaking of the same struggle to ferret truth from the silence of their parents so that they themselves could begin to live. — Susan Griffin

THE INNER HISTORY OF A DAY No one knew the name of this day; Born quietly from deepest night, It hid its face in light, Demanded nothing for itself, Opened out to offer each of us A field of brightness that traveled ahead, Providing in time, ground to hold our footsteps And the light of thought to show the way. The mind of the day draws no attention; It dwells within the silence with elegance — John O'Donohue

This moment, this being, is the thing. My life is all life in little. The moon, the planets, pass around my heart. The sun, now hidden by the round bulk of this earth, shines into me, and in me as well. The gods and the angels both good and bad are like the hairs of my own head, seemingly numberless, and growing from within. I people the cosmos from myself, it seems, yet what am I? A puff of dust, or a brief coughing spell, with emptiness and silence to follow. — Alexander Eliot

Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names.
It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness. — Kahlil Gibran

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

I have seen A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract Of inland ground, applying to his ear The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell; To which, in silence hushed, his very soul listened intensely; for from within were heard Murmurings whereby the monitor expressed Mysterious union with its native sea. Even such a shell the universe itself Is to the ear of faith; and there are times, I doubt not, when to you it doth impart Authentic tidings of invisible things, Of ebb and flow, and ever enduring power, And central peace, subsisting at the heart Of endless Agitation. — William Wordsworth

Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding," Joseph exclaimed. "If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?"
The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: "There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun. — Hermann Hesse

O how gently and how lovingly dost thou lie awake in the depth and centre of my soul, where thou in secret and in silence alone, as its sole Lord, abidest, not only as in Thine own house or in Thine own chamber, but also as within my own bosom, in close and intimate union. — San Juan De La Cruz

I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out - I can no longer see things clearly - my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth. — Clarice Lispector

These years in silence and reflection made me stronger and reminded me that acceptance has to come from within and that this kind of truth gives me the power to conquer emotions I didn't even know existed. — Ricky Martin

Merton. Gethsemani required a vow of silence, and at dinner if you wanted salt, you had to stare hard at the shaker until another brother noticed. One day, cutting down a tree, Jack couldn't contain himself. He held his head back and roared, "Timber." After that, his days at the monastery were numbered. Within a couple of years, he had married, and he and his young wife, Fran, who herself had just spent a year in a nunnery, opened a Catholic Worker farm in eastern Missouri for recovering alcoholics. — Alex Kotlowitz

If you want the light, like you say you do, then why do you keep it strangled in the
dark? If you preach love, like you strive to, why do you run away from practising?
My love,
the universe you fumble for doesn't exist, if you don't start from within. Before you,
all that I can be is eyes and heart. And all that I can do is to remain by your side,
for I can't love you any less than the more I do now. — Soar

An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife. — Nikki Gemmell

In the end... I am fucked up as hell... the problem isn't that I write to someone or speak to someone... but the silence...

Which comes within that noise...
...

within that text!?!?


It really fucks me up! — Deyth Banger

When the earth gave birth to this tree, There came no sound: A green shoot thrust In silence from the ground. Our births don't come so quiet - Most lives run riot - But the bud opens silently, And flower gives way to fruit. So must we search For the stillness within the tree, The silence within the root. — Ruskin Bond

When you meditate, the silence of the senses illumines the presence of God within. — Gurumayi Chidvilasananda

We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult where everything speaks except our mouths. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable. — Victor Hugo

If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love. — Thomas Merton

For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone.
"What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle. — Virginia Woolf

Silence is the source of healing. When we bring things from within ourselves out into the light of awareness, a healing process happens.
In the silence, we can let go of all anger, sadness, fear, loneliness and frustration. — Swami Dhyan Giten

A silence, the brief Sabbath of an hour,
Reigns o'er the fields; the laborer sits within
His dwelling; he has left his steers awhile,
Unyoked, to bite the herbage, and his dog
Sleeps stretched beside the door-stone in the shade.
Now the gray marmot, with uplifted paws,
No more sits listening by his den, but steals
Abroad, in safety, to the clover-field,
And crops its juicy-blossoms. — William C. Bryant

To heal our world we must be silent; willing to listen to the roars of the wounded. We must teach eachother how to feel, only than can an entire nation grow in peace, as the war within will slowly diminish. — Nikki Rowe

When there is silence one finds the anchor of the universe within oneself — Lao-Tzu

WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.
There is my desert. — Edmond Jabes

Listening to the eternal involves a silence within us. — Thomas Raymond Kelly

Good writing arises out of obsession. With obsession there is emotional depth and a certain weight and gravity to the language and story. Without obsession I would be empty, and, literally, I wonder if I would even have any substance. The body is like a cathedral, and the cathedral needs music and prayer filling its grand spaces. Obsession turning over and over within the body creates music, prayer, substance that, although providing the depth, weight, and gravity I first evoked, also allows for lyricism, lightness, and flight up into the various arches and ellipses of the cathedral. Obsession is filled with slowness - and so obsession in my writing, for good or bad, doesn't come about because of an immediate intellectual idea or problem, nor a quick flash of inspiration. There's this slow energy at work, and I begin to become a part of that when I'm very close to silence. — Fred Arroyo

We live in succession, in division, in parts and particles. Meantime, within man, is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

My art teacher had said that if you breathed deeply and imagined something, you could be there. You could see it, feel it. During our standoffs with the NKVD, I learned to do that. I clung to my rusted dreams during the times of silence. It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest part of my heart. Komorov thought he was torturing us. But we were escaping into a stillness within ourselves. We found strength there. — Ruta Sepetys

I am one of those persons who, when sexually immersed, require serious silence, the hush of impeccable concentration. Perhaps it is due to my pubescent training as a Hershey Bar whore, and because I have consistently willed myself to accommodate unscintillating partners - whatever the reason, for me to reach an edge and fall over, all the mechanics must be assisted by the deepest fantasizing, an intoxicating mental cinema that does not welcome lovemaking chatter.
The truth is, I am rarely with the person I am with, so to say; and dependence upon an inner scenery, imagined and remembered erotic fragments, shadows irrelevant to the body above or beneath us - those images our minds accept inside sexual seizure but exclude once the beast has been routed, for, regardless of how tolerant we are, these cameos are intolerable to the meanspirited watchmen within us. — Truman Capote

The means of choice:
She might choose to ascend
The falling dream,
By some angelic power without a name
Reverse the motion, plunge into upwardness,
Know height without an end,
Density melt to air, silence yield a voice
Within her fall she felt the pull of Grace. — May Sarton

I am an accountant." Baru wished she could close her ears to the screams of the sectioned, smoking crowd. "I deal in costs, not faiths." "But you are part of this." Tain Hu was a little taller and she moved with purposeful force. Her words, no matter how soft, were not unintimidating. "This is a cost. This is the cost we pay for broad roads and hot water, for banks and new crops. This is the trade you demand." And there was no doubt who she meant, for she used Aphalone's singular you. "This resistance is meaningless," Baru said. "If they want change, they must make themselves useful to Falcrest. Find a way up from within." "A people can only bear the lash so long in silence. Some things are not worth being within. — Seth Dickinson

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the spoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in the darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the center of the silent Word.
Oh my people, what have I done unto thee.
Where shall the word be found, where shall the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence — T. S. Eliot

Separating the God question from Buddhism does not make Buddhists atheists - within silence lies mystery. That doesn't mean, however, we should infer from this acknowledgement of the mystery a nod one way or another on the matter of the divine. — Andrew Furst