The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise by Robert Cardinal Sarah with Nicolas Diat, Translated by Michael J. Miller, Ignatius Press, 2016.
Here are my top 10 favourite quotes from Cardinal Sarah:
(1) “Man must make a choice: God or nothing, silence or noise” (67).
(2) “Prayer consists of listening to God speak silently within us” (52).
(3) “Sacred silence, laden with the adored presence, opens the way to mystical silence, full of loving intimacy” (122).
(4) “There is no place on earth where God is more present than in the human heart. This heart truly is God’s abode, the temple of silence… The Father waits for his children in their own hearts” (23).
(5) “Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God” (56).
(6) “Nestling in silence against the heart of God, with the open Bible over our head like the wings of the Holy Spirit, is still the best antidote, the one thing necessary to chase away from our interior territory all that is useless, superfluous, worldly, and even our own self” (74).
(7) “Without silence, God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more obsessive because God is absent. Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost. The earth then rushes into nothingness” (80).
(8) “Mother Teresa had a face charred by God’s silences, but she bore within her and breathed love. By dint of remaining long hours before the burning flame of the Blessed Sacrament, her face was tanned, transformed by a daily face-to-face encounter with the Lord” (98).
(9) “If our “interior cell phone” is always busy because we are “having a conversation” with other creatures, how can the Creator reach us, how can he “call us”?” (144).
(10) “Silence is an acoustic veil that protects the mystery… a sort of sonic iconostasis” (124, 136).
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