The right to listen

Perhaps the wise man understood that the alleys of Discourse he had wandered through his whole life led only to the edge of silence where the heartbeats of gods are heard.
There always comes a moment when one learns to be quiet, perhaps because he has earned, at last, the right to listen; a moment when one stops doing things because one has learned to look fixedly at an unmoving thing and this wisdom must be the wisdom of the dead.
~ Marguerite Yourcenar, Phaedo