Category: SILENCE

  • Without noise, postmodern man falls into a dull, insistent uneasiness. He is accustomed to permanent background noise, which sickens yet reassures him.

    Without noise, man is feverish, lost. Noise gives him security, like a drug on which he has become dependent. With its festive appearances, noise is a whirlwind that avoids facing itself. Agitation becomes a tranquilizer, a sedative, a morphine pump, a sort of reverie, an incoherent dream-world. But this noise is a dangerous, deceptive medicine, a diabolic lie that helps man avoid confronting himself in his interior emptiness. The awakening will necessarily be brutal.

    The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise
    Cardinal Robert Sarah

  • To Abba Pambo, who asked him, “What ought I to do?”  the old man said: “Do not trust in your own righteousness, do not worry about the past, but control your tongue and your stomach.”

    The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers
    Henri Nouwen

  • And beware you do not blindly insist that things must work out according to what you consider to be right and good. God sometimes does permit such blind insistence to be followed by the fulfilment of our ardent desires. This always leads to misery and disaster (intended to open our eyes on our folly), and happens particularly often when our desires are founded on wild passions.

    Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina

  • “When harmed, insulted or persecuted by someone, do not think of the present but wait for the future, and you will find he has brought you much good, not only in this life but also in the life to come.”

    —St. Mark the Ascetic

  • Make a rule never to speak to any one but your confessor either of your illusions or of your temptations.

    Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina

  • He was full of wisdom, advanced in age; and we know that silence is the trait of the wise. After three years had passed, through which he persisted in asking God to help him that he may be saved, he heard a voice saying to him, “Flee, keep silence, and be still.”37 And these three words are suitable, as an approach, for all. For when you are surrounded by troubles, when you feel unsure toward something, when you need to take a critical decision, or when you are approaching a new stage [in your life], do this: “Flee, keep silence, and be still.”

    Abba Arsenius The Tutor of the Emperor’s Sons
    book by Bishop Macarius

  • Do not be afraid of the spread or apparent victory of something that is false or untrue…

    Such things will inevitably be defeated if made to stand before the Truth, however long it takes.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Experiences in Life

  • “Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I ask myself: is it worth it? And it just isn’t.”

    —Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

  • “When you perceive in yourself something worthy of praise, and you feel a desire to tell others about it, try immediately to destroy this desire with the thought that you will not receive any benefit from relating it, but only harm.”

    — Metropolitan Gregory (Postnikov) of St. Petersburg, How to Live a Holy Life

  • There was this that set him above many [others]: if he were asked about a phrase in Scripture or some spiritual matter, he did not answer immediately, but would say he did not know the answer.  And if he were pressed further, he would not give an answer.

    —Abba Pambo

    Give Me a Word: The Alphabetical Sayings of the Desert Fathers