Silent Quotes - page 40

For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise. (Jacques Attali)
Whenever in my dreams, I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
If he was silent I could be silent too. Indeed, I could very well do with a little rest in this subdued, frightened-to-death rocking chair, before I drove to wherever the beast's lair was - and then pulled the pistol's foreskin back, and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
The lights grew thicker unheeded, For silent and still were we; Our hearts were drunk with a beauty Our eyes could never see. View quote
George William Russell
They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end. View quote
Elena Ferrante
The higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself it is the silent influence of character on character. View quote
William Osler
The days began to fly now, and yet each one of them was stretched by renewed expectations and swollen with silent, private experiences. Yes, time is a puzzling thing, there is something about it that is hard to explain. View quote
Thomas Mann
What is reading, but silent conversation. View quote
Charles Lamb
Although the stars do not speak, even in being silent they cry out. View quote
John Calvin
And I have known the arms already, known them all - Arms that are braceleted and white and bare [But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair! ] It is perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume? :And how should I begin? I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. (T. S. Eliot)
A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. View quote
John Muir
I do not know if 'Alice in Wonderland' was an original story - I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it - but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen story-books have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea' - is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again. View quote
Lewis Carroll
The molasses voice pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles. View quote
Katherine Dunn
The million little things that drop into your hands, The small opportunities each day brings, He leaves us free to use or abuse, And goes unchanging along His silent way. View quote
Helen Keller
I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? View quote
Richard Feynman
To die is landing on some silent shore Where billows never break, nor tempests roar; Ere well we feel the friendly stroke, 'tis o'er. View quote
Samuel Garth
Certain characters, mostly heroes, have to be the straight silent type; that is part of the make-up. View quote
Sylvester Stallone
The deepest rivers make least din, The silent soule doth most abound in care. View quote
William Alexander
Prayers offered in times of peace are silent conversations. View quote
Paul Simon
The truly spiritual man is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to give all to his Lord and asks no portion or share for himself. He delights not to be honored but to see his Saviour glorified in the eyes of men. His joy is to see his Lord promoted and himself neglected. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and overserious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens. He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few or none he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart. (Aiden Wilson Tozer)
Insistence on the postulate of complete logical clarification would make science impossible. We are reminded... of the old wisdom that one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent. View quote
Werner Heisenberg
Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent. View quote
Virginia Woolf
When you are silent you are again beautiful. View quote
Virginia Woolf
... it is yours women's to be silent and stay within doors. View quote
Aeschylus