45 Quiet Quotes

Hide me from day's garish eye, While the bee with honied thigh, That at her flowery work doth sing, And the waters murmuring With such consort as they keep, Entice the dewy-feathered sleep.

Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.

Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.

It was the silent time before dawn, along the shores of what had been one of the most beautiful lakes in southern Africa.

The snow had begun in the gloaming, And busily all the night Had been heaping field and highway With a silence deep and white.

Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew. In quiet she reposes: Ah! would that I did too.

I wandered by the brookside, I wandered by the mill; I could not hear the brook flow, The noisy wheel was still.

Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The Field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither'd leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent;-hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!

Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

'It cannot be said that we are lacking in faith. Even the simple fact of our life is of a faith-value that can never be exhausted.' 'You suggest there is some faith-value in this? One cannot not-live, after all.' 'It is precisely in this 'Cannot, after all' that the mad strength of faith lies; it is in this negation that it takes on form.' There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can't do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.

O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. For now the noonday quiet holds the hill: The grasshopper is silent in the grass: The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead. The purple flower droops: the golden bee Is lily-cradled: I alone awake. My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love, My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim, And I am all aweary of my life.

There paused to shut the door A fellow called the Wind, With mystery before, And reticence behind.

One afternoon in early January, the weather showed a lack of character. There was no frost nor wind: the trees in the garden did not stir.

We rub the darkness from our eyes, And face our thousand devious secret mornings . . . And do not see how the pale mist, slowly ascending, Shaped by the sun, shines like a white-robed dreamer Compassionate over our towers bending.

The fire upon the hearth is low, And there is stillness everywhere, And, like winged spirits, here and there The firelight shadows fluttering go.

An elegant sufficiency, content, Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books.

I don't have a sense of sanctuary. I don't have a place where I think I can go. I once went to the famous Kyoto temple with the Zen garden, the gravel, the little mounds and it's, you know, it's been pictured over and over and over again. And what they don't tell you is that this little acre or some acre of serenity is surrounded by millions of people taking pictures. So it sounds like a storm of mosquitoes constantly. And it never stops. And there's no serenity. And so not even in Japan can I find sanctuary.

When the gust hath blown his fill, Ending on the rustling leaves With minute drops from off the eaves.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Beside the garden walls, We walk in haunts of ancient peace. At night we rest and go to sleep In haunts of ancient peace. The love and light we seek, The words we do not need to speak, Here in this wondrous way we keep These haunts of ancient peace.

Knowledge and meaning can be too earnestly sought after. for the boy who, blind or helpless, can lie around and find moonlight and dancing girls going about their business in the secrecy of his mind alone.

Silently as a dream the fabric rose - No sound of hammer or of saw was there.

When Silence speaks for Love she has much to say.

In my orchestra, I hate slackness, idle talk and lost time. I always hated this and still hate it. But I can achieve much more when I am quiet and not shouting.

I'm just a quiet man

I have learned that In quiet places, reason abounds, that in quiet people there is vision and purpose, that many things are revealed to the humble that are hidden from the great.

I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

'T was the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring,-not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.

A heaven so clear, an earth so calm, So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air; And, deepening still the dreamlike charm, Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere.

The greatest events are not our loudest hours, but rather our most quiet.

O'er all the hilltops Is quiet now, In all the treetops Hearest thou Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees: Wait; soon like these Thou too shalt rest.

He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into mud.

Scarcely a tear to shed; Hardly a word to say; The end of a Summer's day; Sweet Love is dead.

He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence.