A Quote by Leonard Cohen

GIFT You tell me that silence is nearer to peace than poems but if for my gift I brought you silence (for I know silence) you would say This is not silence this is another poem and you would hand it back to me

Leonard Cohen

Quote Topics

Another Back Brought Gift Hand Know Me Nearer Peace Poem Poems Say Silence Silence Is Tell Than Would

Quote Author

Leonard Cohen
Canadian - Novelist
September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016

Silence is Golden; it has divine power and immense energy. Try to pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be. It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every song, and every word. The unmanifested is present in this world as silence. All you have to do is pay attention to it.

Eckhart Tolle

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

Silence is truth. Silence is bliss. Silence is peace. And hence Silence is the Self.

Ramana Maharshi

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt.

Beryl Markham

Silence...leads us to make a gift of self rather than a selfishness that has been gift-wrapped ...Silence does not mean running away but rather recollecting ourselves in the open space of God.

Madeleine Delbrel

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

Prayer within breath is silence, love within infinity is silence, Wisdom without word is silence, compassion without aim is silence, action without doer is silence, smiling with all existence is silence

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Many things that human words have upset are set at rest again by the silence of animals. Animals move through the world like a caravan of silence. A whole world, that of nature and that of animals, is filled with silence. Nature and animals seem like protuberances of silence. The silence of animals and the silence of nature would not be so great and noble if it were merely a failure of language to materialize. Silence has been entrusted to the animals and to nature as something created for its own sake.

Max Picard

It would be erroneous to say Sohrab was quiet. Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. Sohrab's silence wasn't the self imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under.

Khaled Hosseini

You tell yourself that noise is what defines silence. Without noise, silence would not be golden. Noise is the exception. Think of deep outer space, the incredible cold and quiet where your wife and kid wait. Silence, not heaven, would be reward enough.

Chuck Palahniuk

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

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 never-ending speech. Vocal speech obstructs the other speech of silence. In silence one is in intimate contact with the surroundings. Language is only a medium for communicating one's thoughts to another. Silence is ever speaking.

Ramana Maharshi

My desires are foolish. The things I want are better kept to myself. The hand of silence is steady. The hard blade of silence is clean like night. The code is absolute. Silence is eternal and patient. Silence never makes a fool of itself like I have so many times.