Silence Quotes

People that have a police car behind them pulling them over should put on their hazard lights and continue slowly driving to the nearest densely populated public place, such as a supermarket or shopping center. Pull over outside the busy entrance and start your video camera. Inform the police officer that you are video recording and very slowly give the requested documentation. Exercise your legal right to silence while the many independent witnesses video record the unexpected stop that rudely interrupts your day. If you are given a ticket, choose to go to court. It will give you time to obtain independent legal advice about the allegation.

~ Steven Magee

Start ignoring people who threaten your joy. Literally, ignore them. Say nothing. Don’t invite any parts of them into your space.

~ Alex Elle

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Have you ever been by yourself with no distractions? No radio, no TV, no internet, no mobile. Have you every been yourself in complete and utter silence? With no expectations and nothing else to do?Silence heals.

~ Ana Ortega

Silence heals.

~ Nadun Lokuliyanage

This was once Mazama, I kept reminding myself. This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years to fill. But hard as I tried, I couldn't see them in my mind's eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore. There was only the stillness and the silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing process.

~ Cheryl Strayed

From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here and here, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against the intercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque.He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers, whispers that startle - ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes, or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves - it may be the leap of a wood rat, it may be the footstep of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig? What the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live! (A Tough Tussle)

~ Ambrose Bierce

I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts; peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlours. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and beyond the darkness the West. I had to go.

~ Jack Kerouac

Darkness is a strange thing — it is both infinite and confining; it holds you tight in its grasp, but it holds you suspended in a void. Silence operates in a similar way. Slowly the two combine to become a threat.(Come Into My Parlour)

~ Reggie Oliver

There is only one time of absolute silence. Halfway between the dark of night and the light of morning, all animals and crickets and birds fall into a profound silence as if pressed quiet by the deep quality of the blackest time of night...This silence is how I know it is not yet dawn, nor is it the middle of the night, but it is the place of no-time, when all things sleep most deeply, when their guard is dozing

~ Alexandra Fuller

Silence is the best melody.

~ Azereth Skivel

My eyes always keep searching,for something inexpressible,above the far away sky.I long to get lost,inside the evening-twilight.Silence always tickles me —in a strange way;I meet “me”in the time between sunset and darkness.

~ Khadija Rupa

In the darkness, she listened to the silence. She wallowed in the beautiful nothing it made.

~ A. Lynn

How quiet it is,' Danny said, digging in his knapsack for the canteen full of water he had brought. 'You don’t realize how scary it is, having a whole mountain on top of you, until you’re in the dark as I was in that tunnel, or when you begin hearing the silence.''I didn’t know you could hear silence,' said Irene.'Then just listen.'They sat still, and Danny added, 'Put out the flashlights for a minute.'In the dark, they understood what he meant. All the familiar noises of the upper world were gone: the wind, the rustle of branches or leaves, the chirping of birds, the sounds of automobiles and doors slamming, and people laughing. There was nothing but the faint tinkle of droplets of water, each drop like a distant musical chime, and each one pursued by tiny echoes. Then, after such a note had sounded there would be a long and empty quiet in which they could hear their own breathing and the steady beating of their hearts. They found themselves straining their eyes to see something, anything — the slightest sign of light, but they could not even tell the difference between opening their eyes and shutting them.Irene burst out suddenly, 'Put on the lights!'Danny let out his breath with a whoosh. They all snapped on their lamps, and as the welcome light flooded the chamber, he said, 'It’s — it’s like being buried alive.''Don’t let’s try that experiment again,' Irene said, with a shiver. 'I just hope we get out of here before our flashlights give out.

~ Jay Williams

If silence of the days and darkness of the nights is the indicator of the doomsday, we are already in it.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

MidnightThe hours glide Like drops of water on a window pane Midnight silence Fear unrolls in the air And the wind hides at the bottom of the well OH It's a leaf We think the earth is going to end Time stirs in the shadow Everyone is asleep A SIGH Inside the house someone has just died

~ Vicente Huidobro

The daggers of silence last longer than anything ever spoken.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Silence in the face of evil is evil itself: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

~ Anonymous

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

~ Ally Carter

The Wanderer will stop when they recognize the activities of the mind and refuse to follow it any longer. The Wanderer realizes that with the help of the mind they will not be able to surpass the mind. The Wanderer will experience that stopping is the inactive moment of the mind, the silence between thoughts. In that silence, the Wanderer will experience the Consciousness without forms, and recognize that he or she is in fact the Presence without thoughts.

~ Frank Wanderer

There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman—the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries—something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey—a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute.Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck.

~ Ambrose Bierce

She stared at Raven in a long second of shocked silence, before sagging to the floor.

~ A. Ashley Straker

If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet...maybe we could understand something.

~ Federico Fellini

..i spill intothe kind of silenceonly Khalil Gibran would understand.

~ Sanober Khan

Silence often speaks louder than words. To be heard is nice to be understood is divine.

~ Truth Devour

Have I, have you, been too silent? Is there an easy crime of silence?

~ Hafiz

The sweetest melody that playson starry nights and wintry days,most soothing to my listening earsand calming to beleaguering fears,I call a symphony on air―the song of sweet, still silence rare.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

They tell me to be quietWhen I’d rather cause a riotAnd have everyone screamingOut their eccentric meaning.

~ Initially No

I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.

~ Azar Nafisi

The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.

~ Simon Van Booy

I am not sure if we are numbed to the reality of rape, but here's the sad irony. While the word rape can add an edginess to your language, talking about actual rape is taboo. I didn't know this until one of my friends was raped. Then I knew this, because I didn't want to tell anyone. If she were mugged, I would have told everyone and raged.

~ Christine Stockton

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

~ Thomas Merton

The proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.

~ Italo Calvino

Super 8 film is the language of silence.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.

~ Mark Nepo

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.

~ Paul Goodman

I don’t think I have as many friends as I thought I did, not close ones, not many who I connect with on that deep level of language that doesn’t just allow us to be ourselves with each other but allows us to be understood, even when we’re not saying anything.Silence—awkward or comfortable—is a language too. Awkward silence screams, “We have nothing in common.” Comfortable silence proves just how much we do.

~ Erin Mccahan

The language of nature is silence.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

~ George Steiner

I dreamt of paradise for long,Kept my patience intact,But when sourness hit the bong,I couldn't bear the fact.The sky has its limit,So do I,Hold back and sit,It's always been a bye.The touch of reality,Never touched you,It's been my fantasy,Waiting in the queue.Differences are many,Likenesses are few,Something so uncanny,Always existed in my hue.Deep into the vault,I will bury,This everlasting cult,Not in hurry,Not in fury.

~ Bikash Chaurasiya