Lost Silence

 Max Picard

Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence. The invention of printing, techniques, compulsory education -- nothing has so altered man as this lack of relationship to silence, this fact that silence is no longer taken for granted, as something as natural as the sky above or the air we breathe. Men who have lost silence has not merely lost one human quality but his whole structure has been changed thereby.

 As Meister Eckhart wrote:  There is nothing so like God as silence.