Quotes about Silence

There is no practical area in the life of the church in which reform is more urgent than in the church's propensity (in all of its manifestations) to silence. Such reform, like every moment of reform, means a return to the core claims of the gospel. In this case, it is the core claim of the baptismal formula of Galatians 3:28 concerning the third element of "male and female.

All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows....

if you stay still for long enough, the universe whispers its secrets to you.

Unheard silence does not necessarily mean the death of the player. Unheard silence is not the loss of listeners for that voice. It is an evil when the drama of a life does not continue in others for reason of their deafness, or ignorance.

Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. Original thinkers can be suppressed through execution and exile, or they can be encouraged through subsidy and flattery to praise the society's heroes. Alexander and Napoleon took their poets and their scholars into battle with them, saving themselves the nuisance of repression and along the way drawing ever larger audiences to their triumph.

Nature is the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of its own, and nothing to say. We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture.

Because it is address, attending always on the response of the addressed, infinite speech has the form of listening. Infinite speech does not end in the obedient silence of the hearer, but continues by way of the attentive silence of the speaker. It is not a silence into which speech has died, but a silence from which speech is born.

If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

We stand before genius in silence. We cannot speak it, we can only speak as it. Yet, though I speak as genius, I cannot speak for genius. I cannot give nature a voice in my script. I can not give others a voice in my script-without denying their own source, their originality. To do so is to cease responding to the other, to cease being responsible. No one and nothing belong in my script.

The silence to which the losers pledge themselves is the silence of obedience. Losers have nothing to say; nor have they an audience who would listen. The vanquished are effectively of one with the victors, and of one mind; they are completely incapable of opposition, and therefore without any otherness whatsoever.

Part of getting over pain and hurt doesn't always mean we have to talk about it. Sometimes it is wiser to keep our thoughts to ourselves. We forget how powerful words can be.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.