This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Failure will hurt but not hinder us. Disillusion will pain but not dishearten us. Sorrows will shake us but not break us. Hope will set the music ringing and quicken our lagging pace. We need hope for living far more than for dying. Dying is easy work compared with living. Dying is a moment's transition; living, a transaction of years. It is the length of the rope that puts the sag in it. Hope tightens the cords and tunes up the heart-strings. Work well, then; suffer patiently, rejoicing in hope. God knows all, and yet is the God of Hope. And when we have hoped to the end here, He will give us something to look forward to, for all eternity. For "hope abideth."
Martin Tupper, fully Martin Farquhar Tupper
Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.
Silence |
Mary Webb, born Gladys Mary Meredith
Nature's music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions.
Music |
After an argument, silence may mean acceptance or the continuation of resistance by other means.
Acceptance | Silence |
Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash
Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
In every moment of time, man through silence can be with the origins of all things.
When the substance of silence is present in a man, all his qualities are centered in it; they are all connected primarily with the silence and only secondarily with each other. Therefore it is not so easy for the defect of one quality to infect all the others, since it is kept in its place by the silence. But if there is no silence, a man can be totally infected by a single defect so that he ceases to be a man.
May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton
The anguish of my life here - its rages - is hardly mentioned...There is violence there and anger never resolved. I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word,a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines...It may be outwardly silent here but in the back of my mind is a clamor of human voices, too many needs, hopes and fear. I hardly ever sit still without being haunted by the "undone".
Anger | Fear | Good | Heaven | Hell | Life | Life | Mind | Need | Reason | Silence | Will |
Ere you lie down to sleep in the night, sit still awhile, and nurse again to life your gentler self. Forget the restless, noisy spirit of the day, and encourage to speech the soft voices within you that timidly whisper of the peace of the quiet night; and occasionally look out at the quiet stars. The night will soothe you like a tender mother, folding you against her soft bosom, and hiding you from the harm of the world. Though denied and rejected by men in the light of day, the night will not reject you and in the still of her soft shadows you are free. 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.
Challenge | Freedom | Harm | Life | Life | Light | Men | Music | Peace | Quiet | Sound | Speech | Spirit | Struggle | Uncertainty | Universe | Will |
Not until one man speaks to another, does he learn that speech no longer belongs to silence but to man. He learns it through the Thou of the other person, for through the Thou the word first belongs to man and no longer to silence. When two people are conversing with one another, however, a third is always present: Silence is listening. That is what gives breadth to a conversation: when the words are not moving merely within the narrow space occupied by the two speakers, but come from afar, from the place where silence is listening. That gives the words a new fullness. But not only that: the words are spoken as it were from the silence, from that third person, and the listener receives more than the speaker alone is able to give. Silence is the third speaker in such a conversation. At the end of the Platonic dialogues it is always as though silence itself were speaking. The persons who were speaking seem to have become listeners to silence.
There is an immeasurability in happiness that only feels at home in the breadth of silence. Happiness and silence belong together just as do profit and noise.
Silence stands outside the world of profit and utility. It cannot be exploited for profit; you cannot get anything out of it. It is “unproductive,” therefore it is regarded as useless. Yet there is more help and healing in silence than in all useful things.
Poetry comes out of silence and yearns for silence. Like us, it travels from one silence to another. It is like flight, like a circling over silence.
Silence |
Man is not even aware of the loss of silence: so much is the space formerly occupied by the silence so full of things that nothing seems to be missing. But where formerly the silence lay on a thing, now one thing lies on another. Where formerly an idea was covered by the silence, now a thousand associations speed along to it and bury it. In this world of today in which everything is reckoned in terms of immediate profit, there is no place for silence. Silence was expelled because it was unproductive, because it merely existed and seemed to have no purpose. Almost the only kind of silence that there is today is due to the loss of the faculty of speech. It is purely negative: the absence of speech. It is merely like a technical hitch in the continuous flow of noise.