8. Quotes on Silence:

Quotes on Silence:

The equivalent of external noise is the inner noise of thinking. The equivalent of external silence is inner stillness. When there is some silence around you – listen to it. That means just notice it. Pay attention to it. Listening to silence awakens the dimension of stillness within yourself, because it is only through stillness that you can be aware of silence. See that in the moment of noticing the silence around you, you are not thinking. You are aware, but not thinking.

Eckhart Tolle from, “Stillness Speaks”

A moment of silence... is a falling into the present moment with awareness and an openness of heart that allows for all our feelings, speakable and unspeakable, reconciling and vengeful, hopeful and despairing to just be here. It is a moment of pure being. It is also a nod to something deep within ourselves that we touch only briefly and then shy away from, perhaps out of discomfort or pure unfamiliarity. It is a bearing witness. In that bearing witness, we not only bear our burden better, but we demonstrate that we are larger than it is, that we have the capacity to hold it, to honour it, and to make a context for it and for ourselves, and so grow beyond it without ever forgetting.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, from his book, “Coming to our Senses”, describing the observing of a moment of silence at the site of the disaster which has come to be known Ground Zero.

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.

And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart, you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.

And in much of your talking, thinking is half-murdered.

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone. The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.

And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.

And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.

In the bosom of such as these, the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.

Kahlil Gibran, from “The Prophet” (1922)