Great Throughts Treasury

"The language of the child is silence transformed into sound: the language of the adult is sound that seeks for silence." - Max Picard

"The world of silence without speech is the world before creation, the world of unfinished creation. In silenced truth is passive and slumbering, but in language it is wide-awake. Silence is fulfilled only when speech comes forth from silence and gives it meaning and honor." - Max Picard

"Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage... I have often regretted my speech, never my silence." - Publius Syrus

"Silence is the highest wisdom of a fool as speech is the greatest trial of a wise man. If thou wouldst be known as wise, let thy words show thee so; if thou doubt thy words, let thy silence feign thee so. It is not a greater point of wisdom to discover knowledge than to hide ignorance." - Francis Quarles

"Only in the sacredness of inward silence does the soul truly meet the secret, hiding God. The strength of resolve, which afterward shapes life, and mixes itself with action, is the fruit of those sacred, solitary moments. There is a divine depth in silence. We meet God alone." -

"There are times when God asks nothing of his children except silence, patience, and tears." - Charles Seymour Robinson

"There is an eloquent silence, which serves sometimes to approve, sometimes to condemn." -

"A man of virtue, judgment, and prudence speaks not until there is silence." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"Silence is the concealer of blemishes." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"Silence and meditation are the rungs on which one climbs to the Higher Worlds." - Arthur M. Sackler

"Whatever of goodness emanates from the soul, gathers its soft halo in the eyes; an if the heart be a lurking-place of crime, the eyes are sure to betray the secret. A beautiful eye makes silence eloquent, a kind eye makes contradiction assent, an enraged eye makes beauty a deformity; so you see, forsooth, the little organ plays no inconsiderable, if not a dominant, part." - Frederic Saunders

"Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute." - Maruice R. Shochatt

"Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamour of silence." -

"The fish in the water is silent, the animals on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. But man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air." -

"The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence." -

"Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech." -

"A heavy snowfall disappears into the sea. What silence!" -

"Both speech and silence transgress." -

"Beneath the yoke of barbarism one must not keep silence; one must fight. Whoever is silent at such a time is a traitor to humanity." - Stefan Zweig

"Whenever the hidden, the unfathomable, is experienced whenever the meaning of all things is felt and grasped, then it is ether the devoutness of silence, that most intimate feeling of the living God, that deepest force of religious intuition and emotion, which takes hold of man, or, again, it is the uplift to imagery which is stirred up within him, the poetry which sings in prayer of the ineffable." - Leo Baeck

"There are times when silence has the loudest voice." - Leroy Brownlow

"Guide us to the topmost height of mystic love where the simple absolute and unchangeable mysteries of heavenly truth lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the Secret Silence." - Dionysius the Areopagite, aka Saint Dionysius the Areopagite NULL

"The simple, absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of heavenly Truth lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness." - Dionysius the Areopagite, aka Saint Dionysius the Areopagite NULL

"After the day’s struggle there is no freedom like unfettered thoughts, no sound like the music of silence. And though behind you lies a road of dust and heat and discouragement, and before you the challenge and uncertainty of untried paths, in this brief hour you are master of all highways, and the universe nestles in your soul." - Max Ehrmann

"There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul. God is whispering to us wellnigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God. He is always whispering to us, only we do not always hear, because of the noise, hurry and distraction which life causes as it rushes on." -

"The coldness of our love is the silence of our hearts toward God. Without this we may pronounce prayers, but we do not pray; for what shall lead us to meditate upon the laws of God, if it be not love of Him who has made these laws? Let our hearts be full of love then, and they will pray." -

"We cease to pray to God as soon as we cease to love Him, as soon as we cease to thirst for His perfections. The coldness of our love is the silence of our hearts toward God. Without this we may pronounce prayers, but we do not pray; for what shall lead us to meditate upon the laws of God if it be not the love of Him who has made these laws? Let our hearts be full of love, then, and they will pray." -

"True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable." - Dave Tyson Gentry

"Silence is argument carried out by other means." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara

"By negligence and silence we have all become accessory before the God of mercy to the injustice committed against the Negroes by men of our nation." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"Our awareness of God is a syntax of the silence, in which our souls mingle with the divine, in which the ineffable in us communes with the ineffable beyond us." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"Silence is all the genius a fool has." - Zora Neale Hurston

"Prayer is an expression of man’s inner yearning for a response in the awful silence of the universe. It is a unique process of discovery whereby the searching ego affirms itself in the very moment of self-negation, and thus discovers its own worth and justification as a dynamic factor in the life of the universe." - Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal

"Among all nations there should be vast temples raised where people might worship Silence and listen to it, for it is the voice of God." -

"Prayer is likely to be undervalued by all but wise people because it is silent and so secret. We are often deceived into thinking that noise is more important than silence. War sounds far more important than the noisesless growing of a crop of what, yet the silent wheat feeds millions, while war destroys them. Nobody but God knows how often prayers have changed the course of history... The highest communion is not asking God for things for ourselves, but letting Him flow down through us, out over the world - in endless benediction." - Frank Charles Laubach

"That soul is not idle which, holding itself in the presence of God, keeps interior silence… For the will to keep silence is an act of veneration." - F. Malava

"My only task is to be what I am, a man seeking God in silence and solitude, with respect for the demands and realities of his own vocation, and fully aware that others too are seeking the truth in their own way." - Thomas Merton

"The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there." - Thomas Merton

"A love that has no silence has no depth. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” There are people whose love we instinctively distrust because they are always telling us about it. And perhaps it is simply because God is love, in all the glorious fullness of that word, that we have to be still if we would know him." - George Herbert Morrison

"Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new, sweet earth, and the Great Silence alone!" - Ohiyesa of the Santee Dakota Sioux (The Winner), Indian name for Charles Alexander Eastman , first named Hakadah (the Pitiful Last One) NULL

"Silence is needed that man may be whole. If a man has within himself the substance of silence, he need not always be watching movements of his heart or ordering them by his will." - Max Picard

"Silence is the door of consent." -

"Silence is also speech." - Fulfulde Proverb

"The voice of humility is God’s music and the silence of humility is God’s rhetoric." - Francis Quarles

"To get at the transcendent within oneself, one must break through one’s normal self. We must impose silence on our familiar self, if the spirit of God is to become manifest in us. The divine is more deeply in us than we are ourselves." - Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

"Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence, as if he knew this, he would no longer be ignorant." -

"Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph." - Haile Selassie

"What is it but blasphemy when God is merely my means to an end? That takes its toll. If we turn God into a puppet of our desires (even when that happens by the pious route of prayer) then he shuts up his heaven and we find ourselves thrown back into the silence of our unredeemed life." - Helmut Thielicke

"Even as fire without fuel finds peace in its resting-place, when thoughts become silence the soul finds peace in its own source." - Maitri Upanishad or Maitrayaniya Upanishad