A Quote by Epictetus

Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.

Epictetus

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Keep Most Must Only Part Silence Speak Then

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Epictetus
Greek - Philosopher
50 - 138

We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins—it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of. In the night journeys of Canada geese, it is the silence that propels them. Thomas Merton writes, “Silence is the strength of our interior life.… If we fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope.

Terry Tempest Williams

Power and those in control concede nothing ... without a demand. Hey never have and never will... Each and every one of us must keep demanding, must keep fighting, must keep thundering, must keep plowing, must keep on keeping things struggling, must speak out and speak up until justice is served because where there is no justice there is no peace.

Frederick Douglass

The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The tongue is a small member, but it does big things. A religious who does not keep silence will never attain holiness; that is, she will never become a saint. Let her not delude herself - unless it is the Spirit of God who is speaking through her, for then she must not keep silent. But, in order to hear the voice of God, one has to have silence in one's soul and to keep silence; not a gloomy silence but an interior silence; that is to say, recollection in God.

Mary Faustina Kowalska

The law of silence: Speak little. Say only what you must. Speak only when necessary. Your oratory should be deeds, not words. You accomplish: let others talk.

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

The beginning of prayer is silence. If we really want to pray we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks. And to be able to see that silence, to be able to hear God we need a clean heart; for a clean heart can see God, can hear God, can listen to God; and then only from the fullness of our heart can we speak to God. But we cannot speak unless we have listened, unless we have made that connection with God in the silence of our heart.

Mother Teresa

It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to loses it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.

Edmond Jabes

All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence... Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Silence is the invisible laying on of the Divine Pontiff's hands upon the world. Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature. It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate. Silence is the only Voice of our God.

Herman Melville

I speak as briefly as possible because too much harm has already been done with irresponsible words of bitterness and selfish political opportunism. I speak as simply as possible because the issue is too great to be obscured by eloquence. I speak simply and briefly in the hope that my words will be taken to heart.

Margaret Chase Smith

I readily concede that a prime minister is not required to speak on every occasion or on every subject, but when there is a duty to speak, silence is unacceptable. Silence can be a strategy, silence can be a tactic, but silence can never be an answer to the ills of our polity and the fault lines of our society.

P. Chidambaram

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.

Mother Teresa

When silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

Albert Camus

if you listen long enough - or is it deep enough? - the silence of a lover can speak plainer than any words! Only you must know how to listen. Pain must have taught you how.

Phyllis Bottome

Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.

Samuel Beckett

Silence is terrible and painful only to those who have said all and have nothing more to speak of; but to those who never had anything to say— to them silence is simple and easy.

Maxim Gorky

A Quote by Epictetus

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