A Quote by Henry David Thoreau

The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.

Henry David Thoreau

Quote Topics

Breaks He Man Man Meet Often Silence

Quote Author

Henry David Thoreau
American - Author
July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862

Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever... promises break. Hearts break.

Jodi Picoult

Silence the angry man with love. Silence the ill-natured man with kindness. Silence the miser with generosity. Silence the liar with truth.

Gautama Buddha

unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.

Jeanette Winterson

I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea. And the silence of the city when it pauses, And the silence of a man and a maid, And the silence for which music alone finds the word.

Edgar Lee Masters

Only in the sacredness of inward silence does the soul truly meet the secret, hiding God. The strength of resolve, which afterward shapes life, and mixes itself with action, is the fruit of those sacred, solitary moments. There is a divine depth in silence. We meet God alone.

Frederick William Robertson

The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.

Mark Twain

I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases.

Henry David Thoreau

The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

Adrienne Rich

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

One must not be afraid of a little silence. Some find silence awkward or oppressive. But a relaxed approach to dialogue will include the welcoming of some silence. It is often a devastating question to ask oneself, but it is sometimes important to ask it - 'In saying what I have in mind will I really improve on the silence?

Robert K. Greenleaf

Often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed.

Pindar

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together ... Speech is too often ... the act of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal ... Speech is of Time, silence is of Eternity ... It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another.

Maurice Maeterlinck

The stars spoke once to man. It is world destiny That they are silent now. To be aware of the silence Can become pain for earthly man. But in the deepening silence There grows and ripens What man speaks to the stars.