Osho – If you can be eloquent but cannot be silent your eloquence is meaningless. Unless words come out of silence they are dead. Unless words come out of your inner emptiness they are not full. When words come out of your inner emptiness they carry a fullness; when they come out of your silence, soaked with your silence, they have a music around them, they have a poetry and a life totally of their own.
When you cannot be silent, when you have to speak and you cannot do otherwise, then your words are meaningless, gibberish. Then there is no poetry, then they are very ordinary. Have you not watched it? Jesus speaks the same words that you speak, Buddha uses the same words that you use – then what is the difference? When you speak certain words they carry no meaning, not at all. When Jesus speaks the same words they are tremendously significant – so burningly alive, so aflame with his vitality. From where do they come? They come from his silence.
Jesus used to go into silence again and again. Whenever he came to the masses, for a few days he would talk to people, meet people, convert them, and then one day suddenly he would say, ’Now I will go to the mountains or to the desert. I would like to be silent.’ He would leave even his disciples and go alone into the wilderness, just to be silent. He had exhausted his silence by speaking, the silence was spent in words – now he had to go back to become full again, to be full of silence. Then he would be full of poetry, then he would be full of song, then his words would not be ordinary words, they would be full of luminosity. Then they would hit you and go directly into the heart.
Remember, the words go to exactly the same depth from which they come. If my words come from my heart they will touch your heart. If they come only from my head they will touch only your head. It depends.
Have you seen an archer pulling his bow backwards? The farther back he pulls his bow, the farther ahead will go the arrow. If the bow is not pulled back the arrow will fall short. The deeper the words come out of the silence of your innermost core, the further they will go – like an arrow – into the hearts of the people.
Source – Osho Book “Tao: The Pathless Path, Vol 2″