Category: SILENCE

  • Every man who delights in a multitude of words, even though he says admirable things, is empty within. If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God himself. …More than all things love silence: it brings you a fruit that tongue cannot describe. In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. May God give you an experience of this ‘something’ that is born of silence. If you only practice this, untold light will dawn on you in consequence…after a while a certain sweetness is born in the heart of this exercise and the body is drawn almost by force to remain in silence.

    —St. Isaac the Syrian

  • When God recedes in order to educate us, this brings great sadness, humility and even some measure of despair to the soul. The purpose of this is to humble the soul’s tendency to vanity and self-glory, for the heart at once is filled with fear of God, tears of thankfulness, and great longing for the beauty of silence.

    —St. Diadochus of Photiki

  • “The most suitable language for tragedy is silence. The most silent suffering is the most vocal suffering at the same time.”

    —St. Nikolai of Serbia

  • Do you wish people to believe good of you? Don’t speak.

    —Blaise Pascal, Pensées

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music,

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • this is all inside me, this grief, and I can’t explain it, nor do I want to, to anyone.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • He remained constantly with God in silence, ever ready to repel the surges of both sensuality and anger.

    The Life of Saint John Chrysostom
    On the Vanity of Riches

  • He looked at me in a reprimanding manner and whispered, “Mariam, do you know the circumstances of every person? I won’t reveal the secrets of this woman, but when you are targeted with a thought about something that does not concern you, tell yourself, ‘This is not my business; I should mind my own business.’”

    A Spring in Sinai: Hieromartyr Mina Abood: His Life, Miracles, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Egypt
    Anthony Marcos

  • Do not easily speak things in confidence. Do you think that someone else will understand better than God?

    –a Cartusian

  • Man’s feelings of alienation from the world causes him to avoid pressing himself into worldly matters, incidents, news, conversations, and upheavals. If any of these things reaches him, he does not interact with it or respond to it, but says to himself, “I am a stranger. What have I to do with this matter?”

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Repentance and Purity