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Silence Quotes
Best Quotes About Silence (Top 100)
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In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Martin Luther King Jr. -
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya Angelou -
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley -
I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
C.S. Lewis -
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Alice Walker -
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
Oscar Wilde -
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
John Keats -
I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
Kahlil Gibran -
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens
Jimi Hendrix -
Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts.
Margaret Lee Runbeck -
Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.
Gloria Naylor -
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
Ansel Adams -
I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.
Henry Miller -
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
Albert Camus -
Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.
Harvey Fierstein -
We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.
Philip Pullman -
I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.
Chaim Potok -
Silence is a source of great strength.
Lao Tzu -
Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.
O. Henry -
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot -
Saying nothing... sometimes says the most.
Emily Dickinson -
When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko -
He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.
Elbert Hubbard -
I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.
Arthur Rimbaud -
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
Sigmund Freud -
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein -
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
Robert Louis Stevenson -
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.
William S. Burroughs -
Silence is a true friend who never betrays.
Confucius -
Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
Orson Scott Card -
The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned by no later than the date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.
Terry Pratchett -
Silence is argument carried out by other means.
Che Guevara -
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.
Erich Maria Remarque -
Words can never fully say what we want them to say, for they fumble, stammer, and break the best porcelain. The best one can hope for is to find along the way someone to share the path, content to walk in silence, for the heart communes best when it does not try to speak.
Margaret Weis -
Silence is argument carried out by other means.
Ernesto Che Guevara -
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
Audre Lorde -
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
Adrienne Rich -
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
Helen Keller -
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox -
These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness.
Anthony de Mello -
Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Benjamin Franklin -
I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Elie Wiesel -
You see, I don't belive that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, that has been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians.
Graham Chapman -
If you reveal your secrets to the wind you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.
Kahlil Gibran -
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
Samuel Beckett -
That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
Thomas Hardy -
We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.
Mother Teresa -
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson -
Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.
Charles de Gaulle -
We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.
William Carlos Williams -
Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
Silence is golden when you can't think of a good answer.
Muhammad Ali -
Silence does not always mark wisdom.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge -
If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet...maybe we could understand something.
Federico Fellini -
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross -
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
George Bernard Shaw -
Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I've never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I ask myself: is it worth it? And it just isn't.
Miranda July -
Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.
Francis Bacon -
Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.
Isabel Allende -
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
Audre Lorde -
Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.
Epictetus -
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first; Be not discouraged - keep on - there are divine things, well envelop'd; I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.
Walt Whitman -
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
John Stuart Mill -
I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.
Kahlil Gibran -
I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin -
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men
Abraham Lincoln -
My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.
Edward Said -
After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.
Albert Camus -
The best is yet to come.
William Shakespeare -
Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.
Elizabeth I -
In the silence of night I have often wished for just a few words of love from one man, rather than the applause of thousands of people.
Judy Garland -
When a question has no correct answer, there is only one honest response. The gray area between yes and no. Silence.
Dan Brown -
First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.
Epictetus -
I believe that God is in me as the sun is in the colour and fragrance of a flower - the Light in my darkness, the Voice in my silence.
Helen Keller -
What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter.
Baruch Spinoza -
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.
Martin Luther King Jr. -
Music is the silence between the notes.
Claude Debussy -
Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.
Marcus Tullius Cicero -
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and nights.
Kahlil Gibran -
Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.
Philip Roth -
Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
George Bernard Shaw -
The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic but to end the injustice.
Paul Robeson -
If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.
Emily Bronte -
Even the silence has a story to tell you. Just listen. Listen.
Jacqueline Woodson -
Go to where the silence is and say something.
Amy Goodman -
May my silences become more accurate.
Theodore Roethke -
Rising from the past, my shadow Is running in silence to meet me.
Anna Akhmatova -
The law of silence: Speak little. Say only what you must. Speak only when necessary. Your oratory should be deeds, not words. You accomplish: let others talk.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu -
The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
Harold Pinter -
Conversation in its true meaning isn't all wagging the tongue; sometimes it is a deeply shared silence.
Robertson Davies -
Learn taciturnity and let that be your motto!
Robert Burns -
In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
Henry David Thoreau -
If you look at a dancer in silence, his or her body will be the music. If you turn the music on, that body will become an extension of what you're hearing.
Judith Jamison -
Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
Thomas Carlyle -
To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.
Marcel Marceau -
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
Joyce Carol Oates -
We must be silent before we can listen. We must listen before we can learn. We must learn before we can prepare. We must prepare before we can serve. We must serve before we can lead.
William Arthur Ward -
Emptiness is only a disguise for an intimacy of God's, that God's silence, the eerie stillness, is filled by the Word without words, by Him who is above all names, by Him who is all in all. And his silence is telling us that He is here.
Karl Rahner -
As an artist I come to sing, but as a citizen, I will always speak for peace, and no one can silence me in this.
Paul Robeson -
Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.
Nicole Krauss
Even More Silence Quotes
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Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.
Plutarch -
Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant.
Saadi -
We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.
Zoltan Kodaly -
Give me a mystery - just a plain and simple one - a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery - just one!
Yevgeny Yevtushenko -
There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth.
Susan B. Anthony -
True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable.
David Tyson Gentry -
The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.
Charlotte Bronte -
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood -
I have noticed that nothing I never said ever did me any harm.
Calvin Coolidge -
I drank the silence of God from a spring in the woods.
Georg Trakl -
Silence is terrible and painful only to those who have said all and have nothing more to speak of; but to those who never had anything to say" to them silence is simple and easy.
Maxim Gorky -
When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.
David Leavitt -
From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness.
Larry McMurtry -
A man is known by the silence he keeps.
Oliver Herford -
ELECTED Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.
Gerard Manley Hopkins -
Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
The more efficient a force is, the more silent and the more subtle it is.
Mahatma Gandhi -
Everyone needs a place where they can go to just ponder for a while. Silence is important; it's the only time you can hear the whispering of truth.
Glenn Beck -
We hear nothing so clearly as what comes out of silence.
David James Duncan -
One must not be afraid of a little silence. Some find silence awkward or oppressive. But a relaxed approach to dialogue will include the welcoming of some silence. It is often a devastating question to ask oneself, but it is sometimes important to ask it - 'In saying what I have in mind will I really improve on the silence?
Robert K. Greenleaf -
The tongue may be an unruly member— But silence poisons the soul.
Edgar Lee Masters -
Silence is the only language god speaks.
Charles Simic -
In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.
Mahatma Gandhi -
The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing " or one person " at a time.
Maureen Dowd -
The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.
Isaiah Berlin -
Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.
Margaret Sanger -
True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.
William Penn -
Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.
Aime Cesaire -
Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
Anne Michaels -
As I get older I see that running has changed for me. What used to be about burning calories is now more about burning up what is false. Lies I used to tell myself about who I was and what I could do, friendships that cannot withstand hills or miles, the approval I no longer need to seek, and solidarity that cannot bear silence. I run to burn up what I don't need and ignite what I do.
Kristin Armstrong -
Let us resolve: First, to attain the grace of silence; second, to deem all fault finding that does no good a sin; third, to practice the grade and virtue of praise.
Harriet Beecher Stowe -
A woman once described a friend of hers as being such a keen listener that even the trees leaned toward her, as if they were speaking their innermost secrets into her listening ears. Over the years I’ve envisioned that woman’s silence, a hearing full and open enough that the world told her its stories. The green leaves turned toward her, whispering tales of soft breezes and the murmurs of leaf against leaf.
Linda Hogan -
The dead are silent because they live, just as we chatter so loudly to try to make ourselves forget that we are dying. Their silence is really their call to me, the assurance of their immortal love for me.
Karl Rahner -
It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden.
Muriel Spark -
Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.
Marcel Marceau -
To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.
Louise Bourgeois -
It's good to shut up sometimes.
Marcel Marceau -
All the great pleasures of life are silent.
Georges Clemenceau -
There was good reason for the silence of the Holy Spirit as to how,when, in what form Christ ordained the apostles, the reason being to show the indifferency of all forms of words
John Wycliffe -
Tears are the silent language of grief.
Voltaire -
I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished
Djuna Barnes -
Silence is better than unmeaning words.
Pythagoras -
Writing is like praying, because you stop all other activities, descend into silence, and listen patiently to the depths of your soul, waiting for true words to come. When they do, you thank God because you know the words are a gift, and you write them down as honestly and cleanly as you can.
Helen Prejean -
I saw old autumn in the misty morn Stand shadowless like silence, listening To silence.
Thomas Hood -
Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.
James Russell Lowell -
Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.
Lance Morrow -
We try to abolish intervals by our manic insistence on keeping busy, on doing something. And as a result, all we succeed in doing is destroying all hope of tranquility. ... . You have to learn to immerse yourself in the silences between.
Lyall Watson -
The proverb says that 'The answer to a fool is silence'. Observation, however, indicates that almost any other answer will have the same effect in the long run.
Idries Shah -
Ask a wise man to dinner and he'll upset everyone by his gloomy silence or tiresome questions. Invite him to a dance and you'll have a camel prancing about. Haul him off to a public entertainment and his face will be enough to spoil the people's entertainment.
Desiderius Erasmus -
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
George Steiner -
Silence is true wisdom's best reply.
Euripides -
Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude / And flew to the silence of sweet solitude.
John Clare -
He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.
Benjamin Franklin -
You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.
Hilary Mantel -
I often regret that I have spoken; never that I have been silent.
Publilius Syrus -
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Charles Simic -
If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it.
Calvin Coolidge -
Silence is no certain token that no secret grief is there; Sorrow which is never spoken is the heaviest load to bear.
Frances Ridley Havergal -
Silence is more eloquent than words.
Thomas Carlyle -
Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.
Samuel Beckett -
I love the silent hour of night, for blissful dreams may then arise, revealing to my charmed sight what may not bless my waking eyes.
Anne Bronte -
Silence is not only golden, it is seldom misquoted.
Bob Monkhouse -
A hush is over everything, Silent as women wait for love; The world is waiting for the spring.
Sara Teasdale -
All persons who are enthusiastic that they should transcend the other animals ought to strive with the utmost effort not to pass through a life of silence, like cattle, which nature has fashioned to be prone and obedient to their stomachs.
Sallust -
Silence is letting what there is be what it is. In that sense it has to do profoundly with God: the silence of simply being. We experience that at times when there is nothing we can say or do that would not intrude on the integrity and the beauty of that being.
Rowan Williams -
I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.
Francis Spufford -
An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
Walter Bagehot -
The sequoias belong to the silences of the milleniums. Many of them have seen a hundred human generations rise, give off their little clamors and perish. They seem indeed to be forms of immortality standing here amoing the transitory shapes of time.
Edwin Markham -
Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.
John Lahr -
Step by step, we will break this cycle of silence, poor information and stigma.
Chevy Chase -
The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.
James Carroll -
Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
Phyllis McGinley -
There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe.
Mervyn Peake -
Diligence is the mother of good fortune.
Benjamin Disraeli -
The unspoken word never does harm.
Lajos Kossuth -
The more you know the less you need to say.
Jim Rohn -
There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.
Daniel Barenboim -
Speech is the small change of silence.
George Meredith -
It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they "speak with the accent of natives" they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.
Ivan Illich -
Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.
Johannes Tauler -
In all the silent manliness of grief.
Oliver Goldsmith -
It is true that all of us are the beneficiaries of crimes committed by our ancestors, and it is true that nothing can be done about that now because the victims are dead and the survivors are innocent. These are good reasons for keeping our mouths shut about the past: but tell me, what are our reasons for silence about atrocities still to come?
Damon Knight -
When the owl sings, the night is silent. (Quand le hibou chante, La nuit est silence)
Charles de Leusse -
Not every truth is the better for showing its face undisguised; and often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed.
Pindar -
I have a need of silence and of stars. Too much is said too loudly. I am dazed. The silken sound of whirled infinity Is lost in voices shouting to be heard…
William Alexander Percy -
With their souls of patent leather, they come down the road. Hunched and nocturnal, where they breathe they impose, silence of dark rubber, and fear of fine sand.
Federico Garcia Lorca -
It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few.
Pythagoras -
Fieldes have eies and woods have eares.
John Heywood -
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Elizabeth Bowen -
But let us laugh carelessly like other men. Let us be timid even among fools. Let us knot silence around our throats. For they would surely kill us.
Glenway Wescott -
However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.
Michael Foley -
Put a bridle on thy tongue; set a guard before thy lips, lest the words of thine own mouth destroy thy peace... on much speaking cometh repentance, but in silence is safety.
William Drummond -
We should silence anyone who opposes the right to freedom of speech.
Boyle Roche -
Bigotry and intolerance, silenced by argument, endeavors to silence by persecution, in old days by fire and sword, in modern days by the tongue.
Charles Simmons -
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
John Stuart Mill -
Silence is the sure sign that you're on your way out in Hollywood.
Budd Schulberg -
In silence and movement you can show the reflection of people.
Marcel Marceau -
It is easy to see the glow but hard to recognize the awakening of silence.
Dejan Stojanovic -
To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night ~ brothers who see now they are truly brothers.
Archibald MacLeish -
Silence is become his mother tongue.
Oliver Goldsmith -
When something that honest is said it usually needs a few minutes of silence to dissipate.
Pamela Ribon -
Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
Samuel Beckett -
A good word is an easy obligation; but not to speak ill requires only our silence, which costs us nothing.
John Tillotson -
To listen to your own silence is the key to comedy.
Elayne Boosler -
Odd how much it hurts when a friend moves away- and leaves behind only silence.
Pam Brown -
Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence.
Dorothy Dix -
Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.
Edward Hoagland -
It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it.
Francis Beaumont -
It's very important in life to know when to shut up. You should not be afraid of silence.
Alex Trebek -
Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.
Igor Stravinsky -
Be silent and safe-silence never betrays you.
John Boyle O'Reilly -
I got quite bored, serving in the bar. Since I was there, the customers wouldn't talk about women, and with half their subject matter denied them, it was: horses, silence; horses, silence.
Bernadette Devlin -
Silence is the unbearable repartee.
Alexander Theroux -
Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish.
Charles Caleb Colton -
It is a sad thing when men have neither the wit to speak well nor the judgment to hold their tongues.
Jean de la Bruyere -
There is an art in silence, and there is an eloquence in it too.
Frank Bettger -
If A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y and Z, with X being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut.
Albert Einstein -
If you cannot improve upon the silence, do not speak.
Chris Rose -
Silence may be golden, but can you think of a better way to entertain someone than to listen to him?
Brigham Young -
You can never get silence anywhere nowadays, have you noticed?
Bryan Ferry -
These be Three silent things: The Falling snow. . . the hour Before the dawn. . . the mouth of one Just dead.
Adelaide Crapsey -
Silence is sometimes the severest criticism.
Charles Buxton -
Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.
Myrtle Reed -
A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
When the man who knows all about the fruit fly chromosomes finds himself sitting next to an authority on Beowulf, there may be an uneasy silence.
Brand Blanshard -
It is the mysterious that I love in painting. It is the stillness and the silence. I want my pictures to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt.
William Baziotes -
You've been listening to the adagio from Beethoven's 7th Symphony. I think Ludwig pretty much summed up death in this one. You know, he had lost just about all his hearing when he wrote it, and I've often wondered if that didn't help him tune into the final silence of the great beyond.
Andrew Schneider -
One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.
Harold Rosenberg -
Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall.
Fulton J. Sheen -
He had occasional flashes of silence that made his conversation perfectly delightful.
Sydney Smith -
Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.
Margaret Halsey -
The most silent people are generally those who think most highly of themselves.
William Hazlitt -
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
Thomas Carlyle -
Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.
Latin Proverb -
Their silence is enough praise.
Terence -
But, I don't know, the violence, I can't even talk about. We don't do a lot of violent shows. When I started in television, breaking a pencil was a violent act.
Aaron Spelling -
What she doesn't say is just as important as what she does say — but there's so much more of it. I think from now on I'm going to stick to what she actually does say because I don't have that kind of time.
Jonathan Katz -
A fair request should be followed by the deed in silence.
Dante Alighieri -
What manly eloquence could produce such an effect as woman's silence?
Jules Michelet -
As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.
Benjamin Franklin -
Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
James Madison -
The Democratic Party silence on Iraq is another moment of a voice lost. Faced with votes in favor of the war, the silence is deafening in Washington and the frustration is growing larger among voters. It's time for us to ask the question: What is the exit strategy?
Andy Stern -
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
Albert Camus -
His enemies might have said before that he talked rather too much; but now he has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
Sydney Smith -
Silence is an ornament which is visible from inside. (Le silence est une parure - Qui se voit de l'intérieur)
Charles de Leusse -
Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
Josh Billings -
The reality of the other person lies not in what he reveals to you, but what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says, but rather to what he does not say.
Kahlil Gibran -
Silence gives the proper grace to women
Sophocles -
In fact nothing is said that has not been said before.
Terence -
Teach your child to hold his tongue; he'll learn fast enough to speak.
Benjamin Franklin -
The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
Edgar Allan Poe -
When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
Winston Churchill -
Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced. Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year - and therefore did.
Archibald MacLeish -
I have often regretted having spoken, never having kept silent
Publilius Syrus -
Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.
Samuel Johnson -
Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -
In every sound, the hidden silence sleeps.
Dejan Stojanovic -
Talk uses up ideas. Once I have spoken them aloud, they are lost to me, dissipated into the noisy air like smoke. Only if I bury them, like bulbs, in the rich soil of silence do they grow.
Doris Grumbach -
Silence is one great art of conversation.
William Hazlitt -
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
Mark Twain -
That silence is one of the great arts of conversation is allowed by Cicero himself, who says, there is not only an art, but even an eloquence in it
Hannah More -
In silence man can most readily preserve his integrity.
Meister Eckhart -
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
Marshall McLuhan -
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of a great sculpture.
Aldous Huxley -
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.
Marianne Moore -
All noise is waste. So cultivate quietness in your speech, in your thoughts, in your emotions. Speak habitually low. Wait for attention and then you low words will be charged with dynamite.
Elbert Hubbard