Silence Has Meaning Quotes

Love has value even though we can't measure it. Silence has meaning even though we can't understand it. ~ Debasish Mridha

We are by the river bank. The river is very, very low. Almost dry. But mostly is wet stones. Grey on the outside. We walk on the stones for awhile. You pick up a stone and crash it onto the others. As it breaks, it is quite wet inside and is very colorful, very pretty. I pick up a stone and break it and run toward the pieces to see the colors. They are beautiful. I laugh and bring the pieces back to you and you are doing the same with your pieces. We keep on crashing stones for hours, anxious to see the beautiful new colors. We are playing. The playfulness of our activity does not presuppose that it is a particular form of play with its own rules. Rather the attitude that carries us through the activity, a playful attitude, turns the activity into play. Our activity has no rules, though it is certainly intentional activity and we both understand what we are doing. The playfulness that gives meaning to our activity includes uncertainty, but in this case the uncertainty is an openness to surprise. This is a particular metaphysical attitude that does not expect the world to be neatly packaged, ruly. Rules may fail to explain what we are doing. We are not self-important, we are not fixed in particular constructions of ourselves, which is part of saying that we are open to self-construction. We are not worried about competence. We are not wedded to a particular way of doing things. While playful we have not abandoned ourselves to, nor are we stuck in, any particular 'world.' We ar ~ María Lugones

in an interview Butler has stated that the meaning of the amputation is clear enough: "I couldn't really let her come all the way back. I couldn't let her return to what she was, I couldn't let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn't leave people quite whole."1 Time ~ Octavia E. Butler

You once said you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write (I can't do much, anyway), but in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of selfrevelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind - for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive - even that degree of selfrevelation and surrender is not enough for writing. Writing that springs from the surface of existence - when there is no other way and the deeper wells have dried up - is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes that surface shake. This is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. This is why there is never enough time at one's disposal, for the roads are long and it is easy to go astray, there are even times when one becomes afraid and has the desire - even without any constraint or enticement - to run back (a desire always severely punished later on), how much more so if one were suddenly to receive a kiss from the most beloved lips! I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp. Food would be brought and always put down far away from my roo ~ Franz Kafka

Apophenia means finding pattern or meaning where others don't. Feelings of revelation and ecstasies usually accompany it. It has some negative connotations in psychological terminology when it implies finding meaning or pattern where none exists; and some positive ones when it implies finding something important, useful or beautiful. It thus links creativity and psychosis, genius and madness. ~ Peter J. Carroll

Of course I do. I've seen you upstairs every day, checking out book after book. You stay here reading long after every other student has gone home. If there's one thing I know, it's that someone who loves reading as much as you do can never be stopped. No matter where you go, you'll have whole worlds in your head. No matter how hard life gets, you'll have whole people's lives worth of experience tucked away inside you. No matter how hard the world tries to silence you, there are millions and millions of words just waiting to burst from you. ~ Sara Wolf

Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror. ~ Haruki Murakami

All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here. ~ Jodi Picoult

Each of us has within ourselves a brilliant ray of light that gives value and meaning to our lives. In ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The sun has but half a meaning without the shadow it casts into the ocean of the world. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

When you really understand who you are, you will experience unalloyed happiness. Happiness that you only dreamed about, happiness in the Silence, when nothing is happening but you're happy. Always happy, always at peace. All of the Gods that you have been praying to all your life, all of the Buddha's you've taken refuge in, the Krishnas, the Kalmias, the Shivahs, the Christ, Allah, they're all within you. You are that. There is only the one Self and you are That. Ponder this.

The knowledge of this brings you eternally infinite happiness instantly. When you begin to understand who you are, your Divine nature, that you are not the body, you're not the mind, once you understand your Infinite nature, who you really are and there's nothing else, you immediately become instantly happy. For happiness is your very nature. Happiness, the Self are synonymous. Consciousness, Absolute Reality, Pure Awareness, are all synonymous. There is only One. It has many names, but the One pervades all of space and time. And it is the only existence and you are That. There is no other existence. Awaken to this truth. You are the only One that does exist. And you are Consciousness. ~ Robert Adams

In Nature everything has a meaning; that is, every object is exactly adapted to the place it occupies, and to the purpose for which it was made. ~ Solomon Caesar Malan

Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile. ~ Erica Jong

There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

The symbol is greater than visible substance ... Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care. ~ Freya Stark

It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity, among American Negroes, was championed by jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from the music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For, in a particular struggle of the Negro in America, there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has
the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody
needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping-stone towards all these. ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny ... the time of reading, the time defined by the author's language resonating in the self, is not the world's time, but the soul's. The energies that otherwise tend to stream outward through a thousand channels of distraction are marshaled by the cadences of the prose; they are brought into focus by the fact that it is an ulterior, and entirely new, world that the reader has entered. The free-floating self
the self we diffusely commune with while driving or walking or puttering in the kitchen
is enlisted in the work of bringing the narrative to life. In the process, we are able to shake off the habitual burden of insufficient meaning and flex our deeper natures. ~ Sven Birkerts

Has my heart gone to sleep?
Have the beehives of my dreams
stopped working, the waterwheel
of the mind run dry,
scoops turning empty,
only shadow inside?
No, my heart is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
Not asleep, not dreaming
its eyes are opened wide
watching distant signals, listening
on the rim of vast silence ~ Antonio Machado

Whatever you do in life will be insignificant. but it is very important that you do it because, You can't know; You can't ever really know the meaning of your life, and you don't need to. Just know that your life has a meaning. Every life has a meaning; whether it lasts one-hundred years or one-hundred seconds.Every life and every death changes the world in its own way. Gandhi knew this. He knew his life would mean something to someone, somewhere, somehow. And he knew with as much certainty that he could never know that meaning. He understood that enjoying life should be of much greater concern than understanding it. And so do I. You can't know. So don't take it for granted; but don't take it too seriously. Don't postpone what you want. Don't leave anything misunderstood. Make sure the people you care about know. Make sure they know how you really feel. Because just like that it could end. ~ Will Fetters

It's hurtful somehow to admit this thing and anyway that doesn't mean i'm losing my faith in this beautiful world. But these days now is the time where people have become so much more-excuse me-shallow. When all of the fancy things and outer beauty are demanded, and those who are lost enough to chase and manage to get those things, they will happen to get very nice response from social and able to expand their images and get famous and be seen as someone who has value. Meanwhile those who could see deeper and their souls are insecure of this mad world, they will have smaller space in width but they will dig deeper and deeper into their self, making space in height, finding the true meaning of their souls, the true essential unshakable truth that's beyond the fragile material worldly things. ~ Reza Rusandi

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none. ~ H.L. Mencken

If the Church is 'in Christ,' she is involved in mission. Her whole existence then has a missionary character. Her conduct as well as her words will convince the unbelievers and put their ignorance and stupidity to silence. ~ David Bosch

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place. ~ Robert McKee

That's what I love about music.
- What?
- One of the most banal scenes
is suddenly invested
with so much meaning, you know?
All these banalities,
they're suddenly turned
into these...
these beautiful, effervescent pearls.
From music.
I've got to say, as I've gotten older,
these pearls are just...
...becoming increasingly
more and more rare to me.
More string than pearls?
Yeah. You've got to travel
over a lot more string
to get to the pearls.
This moment is a pearl, Gretta.
It sort of is, isn't it?
All this has been a pearl. ~ Begin Again

No one has expressed it better than a great novelist I heard once on a talk show who said something like You want to know the price I pay for being a writer? Okay, I'll tell you. I travel by plane a great deal. And I'm usually seated next to some huge businessman who works on files or his laptop computer for a while, and then notices me and asks me what I do. And I say I'm a writer. Then there's always a terrible silence. Then he says eagerly, 'Have you written anything I might have heard of? ~ Anne Lamott

As a Freudian, I'm not supposed to use words like evil; my business is with instinct, memory, and desire. Nevertheless, I've been wondering, lately, whether evil might exist. If it does, I've been thinking, it might be like what Freud called the navel of the dream, the place where all the lines of meaning the analyst has so carefully traced through the patient's life vanish into the unknown. But where the navel of the dream is essentially harmless phenomenon, a point where the dream's meaning is sufficiently understood, and further interpretation would be pointless, evil is a mystery with power. It reaches up into the world and makes everything mysterious. ~ Paul La Farge

A male on
the other hand can never get enough copulations with as many
different females as possible: the word excess has no meaning for a
male ~ Richard Dawkins

How clear the realization one is going mad
the mind has a silence, nothing happens in the physique, urine gathers in your loins, your ribs contract. ~ Jack Kerouac

There are two inevitable conditions of life, confronting all of us, which destroy its whole meaning; (1) death, which may at any moment pounce upon each of us; and (2) the transitoriness of all our works, which so soon pass away and leave no trace. Whatever we may do--found companies, build palaces and monuments, write songs and poems--it is all not for long time. Soon it passes away, leaving no trace. And therefore, however we may conceal it from ourselves, we cannot help seeing that the significance of our life cannot lie in our personal fleshly existence, the prey of incurable suffering and inevitable death, nor in any social institution or organization. Whoever you may be who are reading these lines, think of your position and of your duties--not of your position as landowner, merchant, judge, emperor, president, minister, priest, soldier, which has been temporarily allotted you by men, and not of the imaginary duties laid on you by those positions, but of your real positions in eternity as a creature who at the will of Someone has been called out of unconsciousness after an eternity of non-existence to which you may return at any moment at his will. Think of your duties-- not your supposed duties as a landowner to your estate, as a merchant to your business, as emperor, minister, or official to the state, but of your real duties, the duties that follow from your real position as a being called into life and endowed with reason and love. ~ Leo Tolstoy

We cannot repeat too often the great lesson of freudian psychology: that repression is normal self-protection and creative self-restriction-in a real sense, man's natural substitute for instinct. Rank has a perfect, key term for this natural human talent: he calls it "partialization" and very rightly sees that life is impossible without it. What we call the well-adjusted man has just this capacity to partialize the world for comfortable action. I have used the term "fetishization," which is exactly the same idea: the "normal" man bites off what he can chew and digest of life, and no more. In other words, men aren't built to be gods, to take in the whole world; they are built like other creatures, to take in the piece of ground in front of their noses. Gods can take in the whole of creation because they alone can make sense of it, know what it is all about and for. But as soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and death, the meaning of a rose or a star cluster-then he is in trouble. Most men spare themselves this trouble by keeping their minds on the small problems of their lives just as their society maps these problems out for them. These are what Kierkegaard called the "immediate" men and the "Philistines." They "tranquilize themselves with the trivial"- and so they can lead normal lives. ~ Ernest Becker

Any passion to collect has some meaning behind it. ~ Douglas Coupland

The two lovers walked among the willow trees, and the oneness of each was a language speaking of the oneness of both; and an ear listening in silence to the inspiration of love; and a seeing eye seeing the glory of happiness. "Astarte has brought back our souls to this life so that the delights of love and the glory of youth might not be forbidden us, my beloved. ~ Kahlil Gibran

The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

I write best late at night, when everyone in the house has gone to bed. There's something magical about that late night silence that appeals to me. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Muddy language is not confined to policies alone. Each of you has seen replies to simple questions in which the meaning was lost through hopelessly obscure wording. When a person writes to the Veterans Administration, he is entitled to an easily understood, frank, and courteous reply. If our replies cannot be understood, they are not only not worth writing, but they simply create additional work. ~ Omar N. Bradley

While the burning fish is tracing his arc
near the cypress, beneath the highest blue of all,
and the blind boy flies away in the white stone,
and the ivory poem of the green cicada
beats and reverberates in the elm,
let us give honor to the Lord
the black mark of his good hand
who has arranged for silence in all this noise.
Honor to the god of distance and of absence,
ff the anchor in the sea - the open sea ...
He frees us from the world - it's everywhere
he opens roads for us to walk on.
With our cup of darkness filled to the brim,
with our heart that always knows some hunger,
let us give honor to the Lord who created the zero
and carved our thought out of the block of faith. ~ Antonio Machado