Quotes about Silence

It's a good feeling to not tell people what's going on.

Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God's voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.

This is what I think, in essence, prayer is. It is the breaking of silence. It is the need to be known and the need to know. Prayer is the sound made by our deepest aloneness.

What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort . . . than being able from time to time to stop that chatter including the chatter of spoken prayer.

Those who do not yet love one another deeply have need of words; those who deeply love thrive on silences.

Solitude can be very rewarding and full of blessing because in the silence of the inner being, one finds God.

Listening is such a simple act. It requires us to be present, and that takes practice, but we don't have to do anything else. We don't have to advise, or coach, or sound wise. We just have to be willing to sit there and listen.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

Silence is golden when you can't think of a good answer.

Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

Without silence, we will not get any closer to knowing who we are before God.