World That Can Silence Quotes & Sayings

For me, there are distinct levels of friendship:
BEST FRIEND: An extremely close individual you can do anything with, talk about everything with, confide in, and be comfortable with sitting in silence on car journeys; those people you consider to be part of your family
GOOD FRIEND: A person you are comfortable hanging out with one-on-one for an extended period of time and see semiregularly; someone who shares experiences with you but not your deepest troubles and secrets
FRIEND: Someone you hang out with in a group setting occasionally
Acquaintance: Someone you know on a first-name basis and say "hi" to but that's pretty much the extent of it
STRANGERS: The rest of the world (and all your potential best friends in the future) — Connor Franta

Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in the silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have. — Frederick Buechner

What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without? We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble - all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure! So that we don't go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak. We can't stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves. — Agnes De Mille

Yet when, one day, standing on the outskirts of Yokohama town, bristling with its display of modern miscellanies, I watched the sunset in your southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty among your pine-clad hills, - with the great Fujiyama growing faint against the golden horizon, like a god overcome with his own radiance, - the music of eternity welled up through the evening silence, and I felt that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the poets and idealists, and not with the marketmen robustly contemptuous of all sentiment, - that, after the forgetfulness of his own divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his world, which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies. — Rabindranath Tagore

Whereas Beckett gives us silence, Roth gives us noise; whereas Beckett gives us the last hope of comradeship, Roth gives us the self-loathing promiscuity of the solitary offender; whereas Beckett gives us waiting, Roth gives us hyperactivity. In a world without God, we have to make the most of our doubt, and we can best do that by committing blasphemy, sleeping with our friends' wives, giving offense. Because nobody knows anything, we can never know when we are right; we can never know, therefore, what is good. Only by being in the wrong can we know anything of ourselves, and that is the most intense way to be. — Anonymous

Of one thing we may be sure, we can never escape the external stimuli that cause vexation. The world is full of them, and though we were to retreat to a cave and live the remainder of our days alone, we still could not lose them. The rough floor of the cave would chafe us, the weather would irritate us and the very silence would cause us to fret — A.W. Tozer

You can betray someone with a word or an action. You can betray them with silence or inaction too. And in betraying that one person, you can betray a whole world. — Julie Bertagna

The world is quieter now. It is never quiet, but it can get quieter. What strange creatures we are, to find silence peaceful, when permanent silence is the thing we most dread. Nighttime is not that. Nighttime still rustles, still creaks and whispers and trembles in its throat. It is not darkness we fear, but our own helplessness within it. How merciful to have been granted the other senses. — David Levithan

The hermit Anthony once told me that a monk is like a fish: take him out of his element and he dies. Silence is his element. In silence you can trade this shoddy world for Heaven. — Gillian Bradshaw

*You have learned well,* Dragon said. *But heed me, little one. You must guard the webs you weave that make dreams into flesh. Many beings will cherish those webs because they are spun out of magic that lives in the heart. But there will be others who will want to destroy that heart-magic before it can touch the world. Guard the webs ... Weaver of Dreams.* Dragon's breath came out in a long sigh ... and then there was silence. — Anne Bishop

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

You can have everything in the world, but if you don't have love, none of it means crap," he said promptly. "Love is patient. Love is kind. Love always forgives, trusts, supports, and endures. Love never fails. When every star in the heavens grows cold, and when silence lies once more on the face of the deep, three things will endure: faith, hope, and love."
And the greatest of these is love," I finished. "That's from the Bible."
First Corinthians, chapter thirteen," Thomas confirmed. "I paraphrased. Father makes all of us memorize that passage. Like when parents put those green yucky-face stickers on the poisonous cleaning products under the kitchen sink. — Jim Butcher

What would you here, unhappy mortal, and for what cause have you left your own land to enter this, which is forbidden to such as you? Can you show reason why my power should not be laid on you in heavy punishment for your insolence and folly?" Then Beren looking up beheld the eyes of Luthien, and his glance went also to the face of Melian; and it seemed to him that words were put into his mouth. Fear left him, and the pride of the eldest house of Men returned to him; and he said: "My fate, O King, led me hither, through perils such as few even of the Elves would dare. And here I have found what I sought not indeed, but finding I would possess for ever. For it is above all gold and silver, and beyond all jewels. Neither rock, nor steel, nor the fires of Morgoth, nor all the powers of the Elf-kingdoms, shall keep from me the treasure that I desire. For Luthien your daughter is the fairest of all the Children of the World." Then silence fell upon the hall ... — J.R.R. Tolkien

The constant talker will never, or a least rarely, grasp truth. Of course even he must experience some truths, otherwise he could not exist. He does notice certain facts, observe certain relations, draw conclusions and make plans. But he does not yet possess genuine truth, which comes into being only when the essence of an object, the significance of a relaton, and what is valid and eternal in this world reveal themselves. This requires the spacousness, freedom, and pure receptiveness of that inner "clean-swept room" whilch silence alone can create — Romano Guardini

Meditation. That's the key. Supposedly. Calming your mind ind total silence. Understanding your connection to the natural world and all that. You do that, and you can hear it. All the talking. — Colin Meloy

A few seconds more and the Negress will sing. It seems inevitable, so strong is the necessity of this music: nothing can interrupt it, nothing which comes from this time in which the world has fallen; it will stop by itself, as if by order. If I love this beautiful voice it is especially because of that: it is neither for its fulness nor its sadness, rather because it is the event for which so many notes have been preparing, from so far away, dying that it might be born. And yet I am troubled; it would take so little to make the record stop: a broken spring, the whim of Cousin Adolphe. How strange it is, how moving, that this hardness should be so fragile. Nothing can interrupt it yet it can break it.
The last chord has died away. In the brief silence which follows I feel strongly that there is, that SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED.
Silence.
SOME OF THESE DAYS
YOU'LL MISS ME HONEY — Jean-Paul Sartre

If time stood still, each moment would be stopped; frozen. Each moment, individually, can be captured as though the world was a giant painting. Each breath, each blink, each glance will be recorded forever. The silence growing with more strength, more will and more enthusiasm. Not even the wind will more, nor the seasons change. The sun will not sleep and the stars forever hidden. Time is a precious element that must not be lost but embraced. — Alexis Hurley

In this noisy, restless, bewildering age, there is a great need for quietness of spirit. Even in our communion with God we are so busy presenting our problems, asking for help, seeking relief that we leave no moments of silence to listen for God's answers. By practice we can learn to submerge our spirits beneath the turbulent surface waves of life and reach that depth of our being where all is still, where no storms can reach us. Here only can we forget the material world and its demands on us. — Alice Hegan Rice

It would be something fine if we could learn how to bless the lives of children. They are the people of new life. Children are the only people nobody can blame. They are the only ones always willing to make a start; they have no choice. Children are the ways the world begin again and again.
"But in general, our children have no voice
that we will listen to. We force, we blank them into the bugle/bell regulated lineup of the Army/school, and we insist on silence.
"But even if we cannot learn to bless their lives (our future times), at least we can try to find out how we already curse and burden their experience: how we limit the wheeling of their inner eyes, how we terrify their trust, and how we condemn the raucous laughter of their natural love. What's more, if we will hear them, they will teach us what they need; they will bluntly formulate the tenderness of their deserving. — June Jordan

A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It's as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be. — Christopher Isherwood

You got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler's plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore's enemy, the U.N.'s enemy: global warming. Then you get the scientists
eugenics. You get the scientists
global warming. Then you have to discredit the scientists who say, 'That's not right.' And you must silence all dissenting voices. That's what Hitler did. — Glenn Beck

Freedom, sir," I began unceremoniously, without greeting or inquiry, "freedom is the biggest thing for man. Nothing can be compared to it - nothing at all!" Surprised at my outburst, my master looked up at me in silence. "One can understand nothing from books," I went on. "We read in the scriptures that our desires are bonds, fettering us as well as others. But such words, by themselves, are so empty. It is only when we get to the point of letting the bird out of its cage that we can realize how free the bird has set us. Whatever we cage, shackles us with desire whose bonds are stronger than those of iron chains. I tell you, sir, this is just what the world has failed to understand. They all seek to reform something outside themselves. But reform is wanted only in one's own desires, nowhere else, nowhere else! — Rabindranath Tagore

It is in the moments of silence, that we can be taken to our own world where our real essence longs to be part of — Mimi Novic

It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space. — Lauren DeStefano

I came to recognize the landscape of my life in the lives of many women. Their stories and the places they spoke of spanned a world beyond my experience, from mill towns to suburbs, from logging camps to ethnic neighborhoods, from inner cities to Indian reservations. Few shared my place of origin or the events of my life, but many, it seems, shared my experience. Listening to their stories, I came to understand how women can be isolated by circumstances as well as by distance, and how our experiences, though geographically distinct, often translated into the same feelings. Away from the physical presence of my past, I found it easy to argue that what mattered most was the story, the truth of what we tell ourselves, the versions we pass along to our daughters. But as I stood in the living room of my rock house that afternoon, I was again reminded of the enormous power of this prairie, its silence and the whisper I made inside it. I had forgotten how easily one person can be lost here. — Judy Blunt

I can see the driver as if I'm looking at him through binoculars, bending to adjust the volume on his radio, eyes wide at what he hears, which I can't understand because when he hits you there is only silence. My feet, pounding through the grass, make no sound. I know that my mouth is open, that air is rushing across my stretched vocal chords, but I hear nothing. You lift into the air and the car is past before you land silently at my feet, as if something as small as you couldn't possibly make a sound in a world where buildings can come down. — Philip Beard

But as the word satyagraha implies, Gandhi's passivity was not weakness at all. It meant focusing on an ultimate goal and refusing to divert energy to unnecessary skirmishes along the way. Restraint, Gandhi believed, was one of his greatest assets. And it was born of his shyness: I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. A thoughtless word hardly ever escaped my tongue or pen. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. We find so many people impatient to talk. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth. — Susan Cain

Only in the classroom of silence can we gain the calm and clarity that allow us to know when to wait patiently and when to push forward impatiently, when to plan diligently and when to live spontaneously. It is in the quiet of our own hearts that we learn how to calmly manage the present and passionately create the future. It is this calmness and clarity that will allow us to realize what we are called to and what matters most. Finding our place in the world and beginning to fulfill our mission is then nothing more than a matter of time. A man or woman who takes time in quiet reflection sincerely seeking to find his or her place in the world will not be ignored. First will come the inner calm, then will come the desire to serve, and then will come a wonderful clarity of purpose. Guided by that calm and clarity, we begin to affect what we can affect, and only then do we truly begin to have an effect. — Matthew Kelly

Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today - it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence. — Roy Scranton

Meditation isn't just something we do to make ourselves more peaceful and to take some of the stress out of our lives. We do it because it's the only direct experience we can have of knowing God. Because God is that which is indivisible. Everything else in the universe, in the physical world, is divisible. Up and down, good and bad, right and wrong, male and female, and so on. But that which is indivisible in our physical experience is called silence. And when you get into silence, you're coming to know the indivisibleness of your life - and that's conscious contact. — Wayne Dyer

If there is a god, he is not only a wizard at leaving clues behind. More than anything, he's a master of concealment. And the world is not something that gives itself away. The heavens still keep their secrets. There is little gossip amongst the stars. But no one has forgotten the Big Bang yet. Since then, silence has reigned supreme, and every thing there is moving away. One can still come across a moon. Or a comet. Just don't expect friendly greetings. No visiting cards are printed in space. — Jostein Gaarder

Curious,' the Prince continued, after a deep silence, 'is it possible never to have known something, never to have missed it in its absence
and a few moments later to live in and for that single experience alone? Can a single moment make a man so different from himself? It would be just as impossible for me to return to the joys and wishes of yesterday morning as it would for me to return to the games of childhood, now that I have seen that object, now that her image dwells here
and I have this living, overpowering feeling within me: from now on you can love nothing other than her, and in this world nothing else will ever have any effect on you. — Friedrich Schiller

Sometimes knowing is torture. You wish you could hide your secret away in a dark, cobwebby shed, shut the door, and break the key in the lock, so no one can ever get in again. You wish that you could go to sleep and have your last thought be anything but the buttery light of the New Mexico moon sneaking in through the cracks of an old barn's walls. But you can't erase the knowing, and you can never tell your secret. If there is one thing this world as taught me, it's that no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse. Secrets should stay secrets. It keeps them tolerable. Telling secrets turn them into full-on hell. — Tawni Waters

My name," I tell Wilbur in the most dignified voice I can find, "Was inspired by Harriet Quimby, the first female American pilot and the first woman ever to cross the Channel in an aeroplane. My mother chose it to represent freedom and bravery and independence, and she gave it to me just before she died."
There's a short pause while Wilbur looks appropriately moved. Then Dad says, "Who told you that?"
"Annabel did."
"Well, it's not true at all. You were named after Harriet the tortoise, the second longest living tortoise in the world."
There's a silence while I stare at Dad and Annabel puts her head in her hands so abruptly that the pen starts to leak into her collar. "Richard," she moans quietly.
"A tortoise?" I repeat in dismay. "I'm named after a tortoise? What the hell is a tortoise supposed to represent?"
"Longevity? — Holly Smale

If the devil were wise enough and would stand by in silence and let the gospel be preached, he would suffer less harm. For when there is no battle for the gospel it rusts and it finds no cause and no occasion to show its vigor and power. Therefore, nothing better can befall the gospel than that the world should fight it with force and cunning. — Martin Luther

We who live in the civilized world are accustomed to a background roar that never goes away. It is the pounding of our machinery in the chest of the city, and it is the incessant blood of traffic rushing through the streets.
Here the silence never goes away. It is the foundation of all sound. One can hear into the jungle through the silence much farther than one can see into it through the trees. — Pirate Lanford

When my female friends are left
By horrid spouses and lovers,
I commiserate. I send gifts-
Powwow songs and poems- and wonder
Why my gorgeous friends cannot find
Someone who knows them as I do.
Is the whole world dead and blind?
I tell my friends, "I'd marry you
Tomorrow." I think I'm engaged
To thirty-six women, my harem:
Platonic, bookish, and enraged.
I love them! But it would scare them-
No, of course, they already know
That I can be just one more boy,
A toy warrior who explodes
Into silence and warpaths with joy. — Sherman Alexie

The Silence took your friend."
Nobody says What's the Silence?
Satan Says, "It is a creature that came out of the walm. Large as a lake, this creature,
but it's not made of water. It is made of sound. And it feeds off of sound, or anything
that makes sound, or anything that can hear sound. It will empty this entire world of
sound if we let it. It claims this side of town its territory. Anybody that's out on the street
is at risk. It will eat anything that it hears and your friend must have been something it
heard. He will never come back. Nobody ever escapes from the stomach of Silence. — Carlton Mellick III

There are times in history when the dark drums of God can barely be heard amid the noises of this world. Then it is only in moments of silence, which are rare and brief, that their beat can be faintly discerned. There are other times. These are the times when God is heard in rolling thunder, when the earth trembles and the treetops bend under the force of [God's] voice. It is not given to men [and women] to make God speak. It is only given to them to live and to think in such a way that, if God's thunder should come, they will not have stopped their ears. — Peter L. Berger

My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe. The machines drone a gathering hymn as I enter. I know whom I'll probably see, and I know how they'll probably act. I know there'll be silence; I know there'll be music, a time to greet my friends, and a time to leave others to their contemplation. There are rituals that I follow, some I understand and some I don't. Elevated to my best self, I strive to do each task correctly. My lab is a place to go on sacred days, as is a church. On holidays, when the rest of the world is closed, my lab is open. My lab is a refuge and an asylum. It is my retreat from the professional battlefield; it is the place where I coolly examine my wounds and repair my armor. And, just like church, because I grew up in it, it is not something from which I can ever really walk away. My — Hope Jahren

Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets ... My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind. — Salman Rushdie

What unknown abilities had filled this void? Was the world somehow brighter, more tangible, without the nagging interference of language? Was the absence of words actually a form of freedom? I've often tried to quiet that constant voice in my mind, to try to experience the world the way they might - but always the questions rush in faster than I can carve out a moment of true silence. — Eli Horowitz

Children live in a world of dreams and imagination, a world of aliveness ... There is a voice of wonder and amazement inside all of us; but we grow to realize we can no longer hear it, and we live in silence. It isn't that God stopped speaking; it is that our lives became louder. — Mike Yaconelli

I agree with Proust in this, he says, that books create their own silences in ways that friends rarely do. And the silence that grows palpable when one has finished a canto of Dante, he says, is quite different from the silence that grows palpable when one has reached the end of Oedipus at Colonus. The most terrible thing that has happened to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened of silence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out ... the fear of silence is the fear of loneliness, he says, and the fear of loneliness is the fear of silence. People fear silence, he says, because they have lost the ability to trust the world to bring about renewal. Silence for them means only the recognition that they have been abandoned ... How can people find the strength to be happy if they are so terrified of silence? — Gabriel Josipovici

The vow of silence, that's the mind-blower. See, talking is what I do ... i t's a real need with me, a craving, I'm like a word junkie. I never shut up. I talk to myself, I talk in my sleep. The idea of voluntarily turning off that tap, I can't imagine it It'd be like, I don't know, all the rivers in the world just slammed to a stop. No churning, no flowing, no white water, just stillness, crushing stillness. I don't think I could stand it, locked up like that in my own psyche. I'd collapse into myself, I'd implode — Andrew Schneider

Most of the problems of the world stem from linguistic mistakes and simple misunderstandings. Don't ever take words at face value. When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence. — Elif Shafak

I started out in silence, writing as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away
first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud. When I began to read aloud, another voice, one I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth. Maybe it was more relaxed, because writing is speaking to no one, and even when you're reading to a crowd, you're still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the not yet born, the unknown, and the long gone for whom writers write, the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk. — Rebecca Solnit

My love, you are closer to me than myself ...
You shine through my eyes,
Your light is brighter than the Moon ...
Step into the garden so all the flowers ...
Even the tall poplar can kneel before your beauty ...
Let your voice silence the lily famous for its hundred tongues,
When you want to be kind ...
You are softer than the soul ...
But when you withdraw ...
You can be so cold and harsh.
Dear one, you can be wild and rebellious ...
But when you meet him face to face ...
His charm will make you docile like the earth,
Throw away your shield and bare your chest ...
There is no stronger protection than him.
That's why when the Lover withdraws from the world ...
He covers all the cracks in the wall ...
So the outside light cannot come though,
He knows that only the inner light illuminates his world! — Rumi

Because they were frightened of me." She crossed her arms as best she could. "Not because they respected me."
"I think we can both agree that fear is a type of respect."
"Perhaps." She looked slightly placated. "Everyone I meet who knows of my power fears me. Maybe I'm the most respected person in the world."
"Maybe," I agreed, and thunder rolled overhead. Ilsa glanced upwards, her features illuminated by a flicker of lightning.
We sat in silence for a few minutes longer, before I jumped down from the wagon.
"You don't fear me, though," Ilsa called as I searched for another stick. "I can tell. You think yourself more powerful."
She jumped as lightning cracked through the sky overhead. I heard several prisoners further back, exclaiming loudly.
"Maybe," I repeated, and started work on another dance as Ilsa watched. — Aprille Legacy

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

Maybe there is an invisible world working behind our own, maybe words in the silence, maybe movements in what looks completely still. When every door is closed, maybe doors are opening that can't be seen. — Lene Fogelberg

Time changes its nature in prisons and hospitals. In this cosmogony it both races and drags itself. For anyone who hasn't been a long-term patient or prisoner - or both, like Sharmila - there is no way to imagine what evenings are like when you are locked in - the indeterminate hour when the sun has gone down but night hasn't fully set in. It haunts you. In a hospital, especially one where air-conditioning and double-glass windows don't shield you from the real world, there are mixed sounds that rise up from every floor; murmurs, shallow breaths, the sounds of pain and healing. Once the final inspections are done and the trays and bowls carried away, a shroud of silence falls over everything. It can be strangely tranquil, or eerily desolate. — Anubha Bhonsle

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

You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.
...
You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes - sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to. — Chaim Potok

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it's one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act. — Tobias Wolff

Our distracted digital world is here to stay, so the question is more of how we can truly embrace the beauty that is the stillness and the silence. — Tony Curl

Artist paint images unseen, musicians create sounds that emerge from silence, and authors write from a synthetic point of view about a world that can never exist. — Carl Henegan

When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them. — Mark Rothko

Men," said Mr. Kyle, "people have been trying to understand dogs ever since the beginning of time. One never knows what they'll do. You can read every day where a dog saved the life of a drowning child, or lay down his life for his master. Some people call this loyalty. I don't. I may be wrong, but I call it love - the deepest kind of love."
After these words were spoken, a thoughtful silence settled over the men. The mood was broken by the deep growling voice I had heard back in the washout.
"It's a shame that people all over the world can't have that kind of love in their hearts," he said. "There would be no wars, slaughter, or murder; no greed or selfishness. It would be the kind of world that God wants us to have - a wonderful world. — Wilson Rawls

In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom. — Thomas Merton

Take the time to celebrate stillness and silence and see the joy that the world can bring, simply. — Tony Curl

Sometimes I can still sleep it off, my fear. My dreams are gentle now even when they are about being mugged, robbed and knocked down, even when I am pressing my car key into a bit of yielding earth. But often in the afternoons I wake after a nap with an awful sense of its being over and that it never meant much; I never had a life. The valuable sweetness and the hard work are infected by the fact of death: they no longer seem to have been so wonderful, but they are all I had. And then I want to be comforted. I want my old, unthreatening forms of silence, and comedy-and-cowardice. I want breath and stories and the world. — Harold Brodkey

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon
millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. — Kurt Vonnegut

Follow your heart and take a chance that you'll be wrong. Take a chance that maybe you'll fuck it all up and everyone will say you're crazy. What's the worst that can happen? Face that fear and accept it. Because to silence your heart and forget your dreams is to die while living. LIVE. Don't let the world scare you into being something you're not. Get out there and risk the unusual or you'll have to settle for the ordinary. So, no-one else has done it before? There is no road map for you to follow? Then, you be the first! Pave the way for someone else. Find your courage and follow your heart.
Be brave, wild one, be brave. — Brooke Hampton

You are born, go to school, and attend university in search of a husband. You get married - even if he is the worse man in the world - just so that others can't say no one wants you. You have children, grow old, and spend the end of your days watching passersby from a chair on the sidewalk, pretending to know everything about life yet unable to silence the voice in your heart that says: "You could try something else. — Paulo Coelho

The MOMENT YOUR UNIVERSE SPINS OUT of control and collides with something so much greater than yourself, your initial reaction is shock and fright-a deep-seeded fear that runs through every inch of your body and brain. As you are jounced from your course, silence surrounds you, haunting you as the world around you tilts off its axis. All you can do is wait for the fall. — Carlyle Labuschagne

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

To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words ... the tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. the world of things we perceive is but a veil. It's flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable. It's silence remains unbroken; no words can carry it away. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear
filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

The highest form of praise you can offer to yourself, to God and to the world is to spend time each day expressing gratitude. It says to God that you are aware and appreciative of grace. It says to life that you are acknowledging its awesome presence in you. It says to yourself that you are worth the time it takes to be healed. Time spent in silence, contemplation and gratitude is time spent in devotion to a higher calling and a more loving state of being. — Iyanla Vanzant

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

You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society ... In short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality - you can write about life, but never write life itself ... To work in silence and with all one's heart, that is the writer's lot; he is the only artist who must be a solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the world. — Sarah Orne Jewett

I can wait in silence no longer, but I'm afraid I'm already too late. I am trapped between agony and hope - believing I have no right to speak, but knowing more how much I'd regret it if I did not. Tell me I'm not wrong. Tell me that, this time, you will accept my offer. Because I'm making it again. I want you with me, Elliot. It's all I have ever wanted. I offer you everything I have - my world, my ship, my self - perhaps they will be enough to replace what I know you would be giving up if you came with me. — Diana Peterfreund

Yes, I'm a terrific teacher : Grow, Sarah, but not too much.
Understand yourself, but not better than I understand you. Be
brave, but not so brave you don't need me any more. Your silence
frightens me. When I'm in that silence, I hear nothing, I feel like
nothing. I can never pull you into my world of sound any more
than you can open some magic door and bring me into your
silence. I can say that now. — Mark Medoff

You have family, only a brother you clearly don't like to speak about. Fine. That's all right." She ran her fingers through her hair. "But don't ever say dreams are a waste. It's a miracle I can still speak of dreams and futures after all I've been through. There's love in this world, Thristan, love that can encompass the heart abiding in humans' mortal, fragile bodies. And there are stupid little humans like me, dreamers, who believe one day they'll find it. — Madison Thorne Grey

The food doesn't matter. No, up here, in the room. It's so wonderful to shut out the world for a few hours. Rest, peace, silence, solitude. You would think they were luxuries that only the very rich can afford, and yet they cost nothing. Strange that they should be so hard to come by. — W. Somerset Maugham

So tell us," says Connor, "in The World According to Hayden, when do we start to live?"
A long silence from Hayden, and then he says quietly, uneasily, "I don't know."
Emby razzes him. "That's not an answer."
But Connor reaches out and grabs Emby's arm, to shut him up- because Emby's wrong. Even though Connor can't see Hayden's face, he can hear the truth of it in his voice. There was no hint of evasion in Hayden's words. This was raw honesty, void of Hayden's usual flip attitude. It was perhaps the first truly honest thing Connor had ever heard him say. "Yes, it is an answer," Connor says. "Maybe it's the best answer of all. If more people could admit they really don't know, maybe there never would have been a Heartland War. — Neal Shusterman

Everything in the world is information. The information you choose to acknowledge and the information you choose to ignore is up to you. You can let outside factors beyond your control throw off your focus. You can let aching muscles hold you back. You can let silence make you feel uncomfortable. By choosing to focus only on the information that is necessary, you can tune out every distraction, and achieve far more. — Ronda Rousey