Personal avowals

• When I am silent, I fall into that place where everything is music.
  Jalal ad-Din Muḥammad Rumi (1207-1273) Persian Muslim Sufi mystic, jurist, theologian, poet, cited in: AZ Quotes

• I shall assume that your silence gives consent.
  Plato (427-347 BC) Ancient Greek pre-Christian founder of the occidental philosophy, writer, dialogue Cratylus, 435b, ~350 BC

• I made a vow. I knew I was going to write to bear witness. I felt that I had to because not to bear witness to an event that one lived is a betrayal of that event. I did not know how. I was afraid of not finding the words. And I come from a mystical background. One can purify language through silence. And that's why I was waiting for ten years. And during the tenth year I wrote it [ The Night ].
  Video TV interview with Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) German-French Jewish professor, political activist, Nazi concentration camp
  survivor, writer, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1986, presented by the US American TV channel CNN, sitcom One on One,
  part 2, host Riz Khan, minute 1:18, 10:59 minutes duration, 4. August 2007

• I make monastic silence a protest against the lies of politicians, propagandists, and agitators, and when I speak it is
  to deny that my faith and my church can ever be aligned with these forces of injustice and destruction. But it is true,
  nevertheless, that the faith in which I believe is also invoked by many who believe in war, believe in racial injustices,
  believe in self-righteous and lying forms of tyranny. My life must, then, be a protest against these also, and perhaps
  against these most of all.
  Thomas Merton (1915-1968) Anglo-American Catholic Trappist monk, mystic student of comparative religion, social activist, poet, writer, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, S. 82, Doubleday, 1. January 1966

• My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you. [...] What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.
  I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike wo-
  men in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.
  Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.
  And the speaking will get easier and easier. Audre Lorde (1934-1992) Caribbean-American activist, poet, writer, treatise on transforming silence into redemptive action, excerpted 1984, The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action, 26. June 2006

• Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent. […] It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege
  as well as a duty to have the opportunity to speak out – to many thousands of people – on something so important.
  Rachel Louise Carson (1907-1964) US American marine biologist, conservationist, promoter of the global environmental movement, author of Silent Spring, 1962, letter to Dorothy Freeman, cited in: Ellen S. Levine, Up close. Rachel Carson, S. 72, Viking, Penguin Group, 2007

Recommendations

• Speaking and teaching are the master's task;
  the disciple is to be silent and listen.
  Benedict of Nursia (480-543 AD) Umbrian Catholic saint, Study the Holy Rule of Saint Benedict, Chapter 6: Restraint of Speech, written in 516

• Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose, there are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D. (1926-2004) Swiss US American psychiatrist, death and dying researcher, founder of Near-death studies, author, cited in: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Quotes

• We have to climb up to this kind of silence. This language is not taught in the Berlitz repertoire. We have to teach ourselves. The primary teaching of Centering Prayer is basically very simple and can be expressed in two words:
  "Do it!" It will then do you. But it requires doing it every day. That is extremely important when we consider the other
  influences that are bearing down upon us. At times in our lives we have to make choices and set up priorities. Once
  we are dealing with Christ as the primary focus of our prayer, there is no longer a question of simply choosing bet-
  ween good and evil. There is a question of choosing between good, better, and best. The exercises or methods
  that we used in the beginning may have to be set aside for better tools, and finally for the best tools when we have
  moved as far as our human faculties can move us with the help of grace.
  Then, without doing anything, silence does everything in us.
  Fr. Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O. (1923-2018) US American Trappist monk, priest, founder of the Centering Prayer movement,
  author, Intimacy with God. An Introduction to Centering Prayer, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 3rd edition 1. September 2009

• Do you use the silent treatment as punishment? If so, remember the harm it does to both you and the other individual involved. Psy-
  chically, the communication lines remain open even if you are not speaking to someone in anger, so just be aware that the silent treatment is not really silent. Better to inform an individual that you need to withdraw from him or her in order to gather your own thoughts back together. Caroline Myss Myss.com (*1952) US American spiritual teacher, mystic, medical intuitive, bestselling author, The Power of Silence Part 2, presented by Caroline's Blog, 23. July 2018

• As an adult, you can not expect to meet God as a child. You must meet Him in the maturity of your personhood. You speak "Thou" on your lips. You wait patiently. In silence, you listen for the God who is. Out of the silence you hear a whisper, ever so softly: "I am who am." And you respond with the totality of your life. Person to person. God to man and man to God. John Barich, US American author, deleted
  essay A Few Thoughts on Martin Buber's I and Thou, undated

• You do not need to do anything, just remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, just wait. Do not even wait, just be quiet, still and solitary, and the universe will expose itself to you. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
  Franz Kafka (1883-1924) Austrian-Hungarian culturally influential German-language novelist, The Zürau Aphorisms,
  aphorism #109, written September 1917-April 1918, published 1931

• Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Austrian British philosopher, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, last section, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1922

• Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce
  an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously. Lance Morrow (*1939) US American professor of journalism, Boston Uni-
  versity, writer for magazine TIME, author, cited in: Eric Garner, The Art of Communicating, S. 37, 2012

• When things are too hard to handle, retreat and count your blessings instead. Islamic saying

Appeals

• But please remember, especially in these times of group-think and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend
  (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Alice Walker (*1944) US-American feminist, political activist, poet, author, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize (1983) and the National Book Award, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Womanist Prose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983

• It is really important that we enter into silence to rejuvenate our brains. Audio interview with Annette Jahnel (*1962) South African photographer, artist, world traveller touring with project "Searching for Galileo", public speaker, author, presented by the Whale Coast Radio 96fm, host Pieter van Aswegen, 34:10 minutes duration, 1:23:36 duration, aired 3. April 2016, posted 6. April 2016

Conclusions

• Silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.
  Jalal ad-Din Muḥammad Rumi (1207-1273) Persian Muslim Sufi mystic, jurist, theologian, poet, cited in: Goodreads Quotable Quote

• God's first language is silence. Everything else is a poor translation. In order to understand this language, we must learn to be silent and to rest in God.
  Fr. Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O. (1923-2018) US American Trappist monk, priest, founder of the Centering Prayer movement, author, Invitation to Love. Way of Christian Contempla-
  tion, Continuum, New York, June 1994, Bloomsbury Academic, new edition 1. December 1997, 20th annversary edition 21. June 2012

• We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restless-
  ness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass – grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence. […] We need silence to be able to touch souls.
  ⚡ Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997) Albanian-born Indian Catholic nun, beatified saint, missionary, humanitarian, founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, Nobel Prize for Peace laureate, 1979, A Gift for God. Prayers and Meditations, "Carriers of Christ's Love," 1975, HarperOne, reprint edition 26. August 2003

• Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
  Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) German-French Jewish professor, political activist, Nazi concentration camp survivor, writer, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1986, Nobel Peace Prize lecture Hope, Despair, and Memory, Oslo, Norway, 10. December 1986

• Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity,
  to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from
  one's humanity.
  Words bring us together, and silence separates us, leaves us bereft of the help or solidarity or just communion that speech can solicit or elicit.
  Rebecca Solnit (*1961) US American culture historian, journalist, writer, The Mother of All Questions, Haymarket Books, paperback, 7. March 2017, cited in: Breaking Silence as Our Mightiest Weapon Against Oppression, presented by the free weekly digest Brain Pickings, host Maria Popova (*1984) Bulgarian critic, blogger, writer, 20. March 2017

Insights

• Music is the space between the notes.
  Alternative version: The music not in the notes, but in the silence between them. Claude Debussy (1862-1918) French composer, cited in: Jonathan G. Koomey, Turning Numbers into Knowledge. Mastering the Art of Problem Solving, S. 96, 2001

• There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D. (1926-2004) Swiss US American psychiatrist, death
  and dying researcher, founder of Near-death studies, author, cited in: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Quotes

• Most of us are so used to an overabundance of words that silence tends to frighten us.
  [Paraphrased] Words divide – silence unites.
  Truths tend to divide us, but the truth that upholds us unites.
  Brother David Steindl-Rast, M.A., Ph.D. (*1926) Catholic Benedictine monk, experimental psychologist, promoter of the interfaith dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism, spirituality and science, Gratefulness. The Heart of Prayer. An Approach to Life in Fullness, 1984

• It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it. Maurice Switzer, Native American of Mississauga, Mohawk, and Jewish ancestry, director of Communications for the Union of Ontario Indians, journalist since 1965, Mrs. Goose, Her Book, S. 29, Moffat, Yard & Company, New York, 1907, Nabu Press, revised edition 8. September 2010

• Every so often you meet a person who is very different. You can't put your finger on what it is that attracts you to
  this individual, but he or she exudes a mystery and strength, radiating a silent power that is strange and beguiling.
  Stuart Wilde stuartwilde.com (1946-2013) British music producer, humorist, lecturer, scriptwriter, essayist, lyricist, writer on metaphysics and consciousness, Silent Power, chapter 1, Hay House, 1. April 1998

• The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode the meaning because human language
  has access only to the shadow of meaning. Dr. Malidoma Patrice Somé (1956-2021) West African Burkina Faso born, American based psychologist, medicine man, author, Of Water and the Spirit. Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman, Penguin, reprint paperback edition, 28. September 1995

Literary quotes

• All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence. Herman Melville (1819-1891)
  US American poet, short story writer, essayist, novelist, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, book XIV, chapter 1, 1852

• To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.
  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) US American poet, writer, Anthem against Silence, 1914

• "I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; "the things people don’t say." Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) English
  publisher, essayist, writer of short stories, novel The Voyage Out, Duckworth, United Kingdom, 26. March 1915

• After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
  ⚡ Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) English US American visionary poet, humanist, pacifist, essayist, writer on parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, collection of essays Music at Night, 1931

• There is a still place, a gap between the worlds, spoken by the tribal knowings of thousands of years. In it are silent flyings that stand aside from human struggles and the designs of our own makings. At times, when we are silent enough, still enough, we take a step into such mystery, the place of spirit, and mystery, we must remember, by its
  very nature does not wish to be known.
  Linda Hogan (*1947) Native American academic, environmentalist, storyteller, playwright, poet, novelist, writer of short stories, Dwellings. A Spiritual History of the Living World, W. W. Norton & Company, reprint edition 17. July 2007

• A seed grows with no sound, but a tree falls with a huge noise.
  Destruction has noise, but creation is quiet.
  Elin Peer, Danish author, romance novel Yellow, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 18 April 2017; cited in: Goodreads Quotable Quote, falsely attributed to Confucius

Poems