In such silence and stillness............

 

...the mind wanders wide ... and wonders never cease.

speaking in silence.................

 

No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied — it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.

-Ansel Adams

What.................................?

 Every enquiry into first principles, original causes, and fundamental laws, will at some state come up against an unanswerable question: what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid?  What explains those original causes or initial conditions?  And the answer is that there is no answer—or no answer that can be expressed in terms of the science for which those laws, principles and causes are bedrock.

-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

Easy to miss............................

     The phrase "still, small voice" comes from the King James Version's rendering of the "sheer silence" in the Elijah story, an interpretation that isn't the best translation of the Hebrew but that does represent well the nature of God's communication with us.  The sovereign King of the universe, to our surprise, does not often trumpet his message to his subjects.  God's volume knob is rarely turned all the way to the right; his voice in our ears is subtle, restrained, even easy to miss.

-Adam S. McHugh, The Listening Life

Me too............................

"I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay Self-Reliance

Almost like God's fingerprint..............

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. 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.

-attributed to Mother Teresa

image via APOD.  Enlargeable with description

Content...........................

"Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I'm in, therein to be content."

-Helen Keller

Degree of Difficulty...........3.5

thanks Rob

degree of difficulty scale here

Shhhhh....................................

thanks michael

Great moments on the Television............

.................................................................The Cone of Silence.

Maxwell Smart and the Chief employing the cone - here

Works too.....................................

Fragrance of a rose.......................

The disciples were absorbed in a discussion of Lao-tzu's dictum:

     Those who know do not say:
     those who say do not know.

When the Master entered, they asked him what the words meant:

Said the Master,  "Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?"

All of them knew.

Then he said, "Put it into words."

All of them were silent.

-Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, as excerpted from  The Spirituality of Imperfection:  Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

thanks Doug

Speak...................................

via

The Cone of Silence.............

Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested. 
Elizabeth I 
 
Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own. 
George Bernard Shaw 


I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers. 
Khalil Gibran 

Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrusts himself. 
Francois de La Rochefoucauld 

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words. 
Elbert Hubbard 

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. 
Martin Luther King, Jr.


A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
Emile M. Cioran 

Silence is the virtue of fools. 
Francis Bacon 


Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish. 
Charles Caleb Colton

I crave a cone of silence every once in while. 
Laura Linney 

Ed. Note:   The picture above is from the TV show Get Smart.  Max and the Chief used the "Cone of Silence" to talk secretly.   Once in the Cone, however, they couldn't hear each other so they would shout until everyone could hear them.  Great TV!

A lifetime....................

Not everybody..............................

thanks hugh

Shhhhhhhh..........................

"In 1969, UNESCO passed a resolution outlining a human right that doesn't get talked about much - the right to silence.  I think they're referring to what happens if a noisy factory gets built beside your house, or a shooting range, or if a disco opens downstairs.  They don't mean you can demand that a restaurant turn off the classic rock tunes it's playing or that you can muzzle the guy next to you on the train yelling into his cellphone.  It's a nice thought though.....despite our innate dread of absolute silence, we should have the right to take an occasional aural break, to experience, however briefly, a moment or two of sonic air.  To have meditative moment, a head clearing space, is a nice idea for a human right."
-David Byrne, as quoted in the October Smithsonian

Ed. Note:  Wasted time on Searched the Oracle Google for ten minutes but could not find said resolution.  Sorry.

image via

It's an acquired skill.................

"He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing."
-Oscar Wilde