Quotes about Silence

I remember receiving hate mail saying, "Tell this talking Trappist who took a vow of silence to shut up!" Though silence is a traditional part of their lives, Trappists take no such vow. Maintaining silence (to increase contemplation) does not by itself rule out communication (which they do in sign language). I had an answer for the hate-mongers: "Writing is a form of contemplation.

In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.

We do not know we are full of paradise because we are so full of our own noise that we cannot hear God singing us and all things into being.

To separate meditation from prayer, reading and contemplation is to falsify our picture of the monastic way of prayer. In proportion as meditation takes on a more contemplative character, we see that it is not only a means to an end, but also has something of the nature of an end.

Oh, America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all your mountains and forests are really for!

From where I sit and write at this moment, I look out the window, across the quiet guest-house garden, with the four banana trees and the big red and yellow flowers around Our Lady's statue. I can see the door where Dan entered and where I entered. Beyond the Porter's Lodge is a low green hill where there was wheat this summer. And out there, yonder, I can hear the racket of the diesel tractor: I don't know what they are ploughing.)

If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, will never become anything, and in the end, because have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.

Suppose that my poverty be a secret hunger for spiritual riches: suppose that by pretending to empty myself, pretending to be silent, I am really trying to cajole God into enriching me with some experience--what then? Then everything becomes a distraction.

But God gives true theologians a hunger born of humility, which cannot be satisfied with formulas and arguments, and which looks for something closer to God than analogy can bring you. This serene hunger of the spirit penetrates the surface of words and goes beyond the human formulation of mysteries and seeks, in the humiliation of silence, intellectual solitude and interior poverty, the gift of a supernatural apprehension which words cannot truly signify.

In Silence, God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.

He is heard only when we hope to hear Him, and if, thinking our hope to be fulfilled, we cease to speak, His silence ceases to be vivid and becomes dead, even though we recharge it with the echo of our own emotional noise.

Silence is not broken by speech, but by the anxiety to be heard.