Silence Quotes

“the same metaphors and themes sound again and again in mystic discourse, like a muffled peal of bells in English change-ringing.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History

“The point of the wild-track is that every silence is different and distinctive. Each is charged with the murmurs of the landscape around it, with the personalities of those who have entered it and remain present within it, together with the memories of conversations which have come and gone. It has been well said that silence ‘has no opposite and is the ground of both sound and the absence of sound’.2 It is an ambassador between the mundane and the sublime, solving tensions and miseries which words cannot touch.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History

“All the soul needs to do during these times of quietude is be still and make no noise. What I mean by noise is rushing around with the intellect trying to rustle up reflections of gratitude and words of praise for the gift you are being given. It’s that impulse of mind to catalogue your transgressions to convince yourself that you do not deserve to receive such grace. It’s that commotion the faculties create, the intellect trying to conjure up images and the memory rushing to store them. These faculties wear me out.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History

“the dissident and democratic voice of contemplative silence.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History

“He recommended the contemplation and mental repetition of the name of Jesus, remarking that it reminded him of how, when he was young, old women and girls would sweeten their foul breath with chewing-gum. How much more would Jesus’s name banish the foulness of demons, he concluded triumphantly.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History

“theophany of quietness”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History