Great Throughts Treasury

"Before you speak, it is necessary for you to listen, for God speaks in the silence of the heart." - Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL

"The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between." - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart

"My beloved children, who are the pupils of my eye—Truth is silent. If Truth has dawned within you, then there will be no further speech. It is silence, and silence is the greatest Truth, the best question. If there is no Truth, then there will be a lot of talk and questions. One is good and the other is bad. If there is good within you, there will be no further noise within. But if you are full of bad, there will be so much of talk, speeches and questions. Therefore, seek the good. God does not make a noise. If you need anything, then you will have only to knock, and if you are tuned to that point, with the sound of that knock you will get an answer immediately. No noise, you don't have to make a sound. This is the Truth." - Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

"There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it." - N. Scott Momaday, fully Navarre Scott Momaday

" I behold there the far, faint motion of leaves. The leaves shine, and they will shiver down to death. Something like a leaf lies here within me; it wavers almost not at all, and there is no light to see it by - that it withers upon a black field. If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth, I would make a word of it at last, and I would speak it into the silence of the sun." - N. Scott Momaday, fully Navarre Scott Momaday

"A mother's silence is the worst form of punishment for it is left to one's imagination to conjure up what is in her mind." - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

"The art of life begins with meditation. And by meditation I mean silence of the mind, silence of the heart, reaching to the very center of your being and finding the treasure that is your reality. Once you have known it, you can radiate love, you can radiate life, you can radiate creativity. Your words will become poetic, your gestures will have grace; even your silence will have a song to it. Even if you are sitting unmoving, you will be in a dance. Each breath coming in, going out, will be a joy, each heartbeat so precious because it is the heart beat of the universe itself — you are part of it." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

"God is not a thing, it is an attitude, an attitude of celebration and festivity. Drop sadness. He is so close by; dance! Drop long faces, it is sacrilege — because He is so close by. Forget your childish miseries and worries; He is so close by. Don’t go on brooding about immaterial things; He is so close by. Allow Him to hold your hand. He has been waiting for you for long. As your silence grows; your friendliness, your love grows; your life becomes a moment-to-moment dance, a joy, a celebration." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

"There are many moments in friendship, as in love, when silence is beyond words. The faults of our friend may be clear to us, but it is well to seem to shut our eyes to them. Friendship is usually treated by the majority of mankind as a tough and everlasting thing which will survive all manner of bad treatment. But this is an exceedingly great and foolish error; it may die in an hour of a single unwise word; its conditions of existence are that it should be dealt with delicately and tenderly, being as it is a sensitive plant and not a roadside thistle. We must not expect our friend to be above humanity." - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL

"Let us look for secret things somewhere in the world on the blue shore of silence or where the storm has passed rampaging like a train. There the faint signs are left, coins of time and water, debris ,celestial ash and the irreplaceable rapture of sharing in the labour of soitude in the sand." - Pablo Neruda, pen name for Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto

"Practice is an effort to still the mind’s fluctuations in order to silence the consciousness." - Patañjali NULL

"Supreme happiness cannot be found in the world; but we need not run away to the jungle to seek Him (God) who is the Giver of all happiness. In this jungle of daily life, we may find Him in the cave of silence. Remember, the only man who is happy is the man who sits in the temple of silence and shuts out all storms or worries. Nothing can challenge the quietness of his soul." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"That deep silence has a melody of its own, a sweetness unknown amid the harsh discords of the world's sounds. " - Paul Brunton, born Hermann Hirsch, wrote under various pseudonyms including Brunton Paul, Raphael Meriden and Raphael Delmonte

"This withdrawal from the day's turmoil into creative silence is not a luxury, a fad, or a futility. It is a necessity, because it tries to provide the conditions wherein we are able to yield ourselves to intuitive leadings, promptings, warnings, teachings, and counsels and also to the inspiring peace of the soul. It dissolves mental tensions and heals negative emotions. " - Paul Brunton, born Hermann Hirsch, wrote under various pseudonyms including Brunton Paul, Raphael Meriden and Raphael Delmonte

"When it seems humanly impossible to do more in a difficult situation, surrender yourself to the inner silence and thereafter wait for a sign of obvious guidance or for a renewal of inner strength. " - Paul Brunton, born Hermann Hirsch, wrote under various pseudonyms including Brunton Paul, Raphael Meriden and Raphael Delmonte

"Conversation stock being a joint and common property, everyone should take a share in it; and yet there may be societies in which silence will be our best contribution." - Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith

"Silence! I am learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night. " - Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin

"At that moment it seemed to him that time stood still and the soul of the world surged within him. When he looked into her dark eyes and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke. The language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. Something that exerted the same force whenever two pairs of eyes met, as had theirs here at the well. She smiled, and that was certainly an omen. The omen he had been awaiting without even knowing he was for all his life. The omen he sought to find in his sheep and in his books. In the crystals and in the silence of the desert… It was the pure language of the world. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time. What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life. And that, with no need for words she recognized the same thing. He was more certain of it, than of anything in the world. He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way never learned the universal language. Because when you know that language, it’s easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you. Whether it’s in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love and makes a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one's dreams would have no meaning. " - Paulo Coelho

"Every blessing ignored becomes a curse… Every day the Lord gives us - together with the sun - a moment when it is possible to change all that makes us unhappy. Every day we try to deceive ourselves that we recognize this moment, so it does not exist, that is identical today as yesterday and tomorrow will be the same. But the one who pays attention to that last day, he discovers a magical moment. It can be hidden at the time the doors unlock in the morning, in that brief silence that suddenly occurs after lunch, in a thousand and one things that look the same. This moment exists - a moment when we all dread outright star power and allow us to do miracles. Happiness is sometimes a blessing, but most often winning. The magical moment that occurs every day helps us to change, to lead us to engage in a search of their dreams… Every day the sun shines on a new world, full of what we call the monotony of the new opportunities, we do not know see the difference that distinguishes one day from its predecessor… Every second of the search is an encounter with God. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, every day has been luminous... I've discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve." - Paulo Coelho

"This conflict with the sacred is what gives us the blessing and makes us grow up… When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there's no need at all to understand what's happening, because everything happens within you… To live is to experience things, not sit around pondering the meaning of life… To realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation… To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God… Today don't beg, don't ask, just thank God in silence for all the blessings in your life… To die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day. Every day was there to be lived or to mark one’s departure from this world… To injure your opponent is to injure yourself." - Paulo Coelho

"If you reason instead of repeating what is taught you; if you analyze the law and strip off those cloudy fictions with which it has been draped in order to conceal its real origin, which is the right of the stronger, and its substance, which has ever been the consecration of all the tyrannies handed down to mankind through its long and bloody history; when you have comprehended this, your contempt for the law will be profound indeed. You will understand that to remain the servant of the written law is to place yourself every day in opposition to the law of conscience, and to make a bargain on the wrong side; and, since this struggle cannot go on forever, you will either silence your conscience and become a scoundrel, or you will break with tradition, and you will work with us for the utter destruction of all this injustice, economic, social and political." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"Against Nature's silence I use action. In the vast indifference I invent a meaning. I don't watch unmoved I intervene and say that this and this are wrong and I work to alter them and improve them. The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes. " - Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss

"Prison is designed to silence dissent. We savage people in order to make them better citizens. We torture men and women to make them kinder and more productive. We execute human beings, in order to teach our children respect for human life." - Philip Berrigan

"A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words." -

"Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by, and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste. " - Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin

"A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words." - Phillips Brooks

"Rabbi Chananiah ben Teradion said: If two sit together and no words of Torah are interchanged between them, theirs is the session of the scornful, as it is written (Psalm 1:1) "Nor sit in the seat of scoffers." But when two sit together and words of Torah pass between them, the Divine Presence rests between them, as it is written (Malachi 3:16) "Then those who revered the Lord spoke with one another. The Lord took note and listened, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who revered the Lord and thought on his name." Scripture speaks here of two. Whence do we learn that if even one sits and occupies himself in the Torah, the Holy One blessed be He, appoints him a reward? Because it is written (Lamentations 3:28) "to sit alone in silence when the Lord has imposed it."" - Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL

"Rabbi Akiva said: “Jesting and frivolity lead a man towards promiscuity. Tradition is a safeguarding fence around the Torah. Tithes are a fence to wealth. Vows a fence to abstinence. Silence is a fence to wisdom.”" - Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL

"I shall assume that your silence gives consent." - Plato NULL

"Millions so wished in silence for means to travel more rapidly, to send intelligence more rapidly; and this brought steam and the electric telegraph. " - Prentice Mulford

"Soon other questions and demands are to be answered, questions ever going out in silence from multitudes; and, in answering them, in at first attempting to carry out and prove the answers and the means shown to accomplish or realize many things deemed impossible or visionary, there will be mistake and stupidity, and blunder and silliness, and breakdowns and failures, and consequent ridicule; just as there were ten smashes on railways, and ten bursted boilers in the earlier era of the use of steam, to one of today. " - Prentice Mulford

"Let me silent be; For silence is the speech of love, The music of the spheres above. Men can be great when great occasions call: In little duties women find their spheres, The narrow cares that cluster round the hearth. Not that the heavens the little can make great, But many a man has lived an age too late." - R. H. Stoddard, fully Richard Henry Stoddard

"You should keep silence or to say something that is better than a silence." - Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL

"If a word spoken in its time is worth one piece of money, silence in its time is worth two." - Rabbinical Proverbs

"Without purity of heart, not only can one not “see” God, but it is equally impossible to have any idea of what is involved in doing so. Without the silence of the intellect and the will, without the silence of the senses, without the openness of what some call “the third eye” (spoken of not only by Tibetans but also by the disciples of Richard of Saint Victor), it is not possible to approach the sphere in which the word God can have a meaning. According to Richard of Saint Victor, there exist three eyes: the occulus carnis, the occulus rationis, and the occulus fidei (the eye of the body, the eye of reason, and the eye of faith). The “third eye” is the organ of the faculty that distinguishes us from other living beings by giving us access to a reality that transcends, without denying, that which captures the intelligence and the senses." - Raimon Panikkar, fully Raimon Panikkar-Alemany

"Quiet had a roof and it had walls around it, and you could sit inside it. She had never thought of silence as a place.One of the friends, Tom Williams told her,'the place is in your heart, Louise. Everything else is just clutter." - Lloyd Jones

"Under these circumstances, silence among such a large group of people is an uncomfortable thing to experience. Guilt spreads around even to those who have nothing to feel guilty about. Many held their breath. Or, as I heard later, many did what me and my mum did and closed their eyes. We closed our eyes in a bid to remove ourselves." - Lloyd Jones

"Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us. When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness. Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and others. That which is hidden. In this culture the soul and the heart too often go homeless. Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you." - Rachel Naomi Remen

"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

"What does it mean to a physician to practice medicine without mystery? When I was a medical student, my school had a large, black-tie retirement dinner for a very famous man on the medical faculty, whose scientific contribution had earned him a Nobel prize. He was 80 years old. The entire school gathered to honor him, and famous medical people came from all over the world. This doctor gave a wonderful speech describing the progress of scientific knowledge during the 50 years that he had been a physician. We gave him a standing ovation. After we sat down he remained at the podium. There was a brief silence and then he said, There's something else important that I want to say. And I especially want to tell the students. I have been a physician for 50 years and I don't know anything more about life now than I did at the beginning. I am no wiser. It slipped through my fingers. We were stunned into silence. I remember thinking that perhaps he was senile. In retrospect, it was a very remarkable thing he did. He took an opportunity to warn us about the cage of ideas and roles and self-expectations that was closing around us, even as he spoke to us - the cage that would keep us from achieving our good purpose, which is healing. Healing is a matter of wisdom, not of scientific knowledge." - Rachel Naomi Remen

"As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time. Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest, the outermost limit?" - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice surging forth with all my earthly feelings? They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wings and whitely fly in circles round your face. My soul, dressed in silence, rises up and stands alone before you: can't you see? Don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe upon your vision as upon a tree? If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream. But when you want to wake, I am your wish, and I grow strong with all magnificence and turn myself into a star's vast silence above the strange and distant city, Time." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"I have a notion that, at big fires, a moment of extreme suspense can sometimes occur, when the jets of water slacken off, the firemen no longer climb, no one moves a muscle. Without a sound, a high black wall of masonry cants over up above, the fire blazing behind it, and, without a sound, leans, about to topple. Everyone stands waiting, shoulders tensed, faces drawn in around their eyes, for the terrible crash. That is how the silence is here." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts. Feelings for whom? O you the transformation of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape. You stranger: music. You heart-space grown out of us. The deepest space in us, which, rising above us, forces its way out,-- holy departure: when the innermost point in us stands outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other side of the air: pure, boundless, no longer habitable." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"Soul in the room where I am, here I am, Entrungene, staggering. Wag ego then? I'll throw myself? were eligible for a lot where I urged. Now that even the slightest power of accomplishing it completely, in silence before the competition -: Wag ego then? Throw myself Although I suffered from self-conscious body, nights, so I befriended him, the earthen, with infinity, sobbing overflowed, that I raised . his austere heart But now, whom ego, show me your soul I? Who? is surprised Suddenly I want to be the eternal, not adhering to the contrary, no longer comforter, feeling with nothing but heaven. Hardly a secret, because in the open all the secrets of a, an anxious O go by how the big hugs. What is embraced me, which I continue to give me, awkward Embracing? Or I forgot, and counting? forgot the finite turmoil that heavy lovers? Stalin ', rush up and Kann?" - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"The moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"All silence is. All emptiness. And now: The dawn." -

"She wants her silence to be final. Here, more than anyplace else, she wants her memory uncontested. She does not want me talking to others, gathering other stories, looking into the remnants of my father's past. When she is silent, she wants those things about which she refuses to speak to remain as quiet as the tomb. That is the ultimate power of stories. They take on themselves the decision about what will be remembered and what will be told. The part of the past she claims most fiercely is the part she wants forgotten." - Richard Grant White

"Let me silent be; For silence is the speech of love, The music of the spheres above." - Richard Henry Stoddard

"Which of us were fortunate--who can tell? For you there is silence and cold twilight drooping in awful desolation over those motionless lands. For us sunlight and the sound of women's voices, song and hope and laughter, despair, gaiety, love--life." - Richard Aldington, born Edward Godfree Aldington