Silence Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Mother Teresa

Colette

Aldous Huxley

Elie Wiesel

Vittorio Alfieri

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Karen Blixen

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.

To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

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.

But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love, And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.

People ask me if I have some kind of death wish, to keep saying the things I do. The answer is no: I would like to keep living. However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Music and silence... combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.

Should it be proved that woman is naturally weaker than man, from whence does it follow that it is natural for her to labour to become still weaker than nature intended her to be? Arguments of this cast are an insult to common sense, and savour of passion. The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger, and though conviction may not silence many boisterous disputants, yet, when any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Not every truth is the better for showing its face undisguised; and often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Edward Dahlberg

Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.

To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

Sometimes there is greater lack of communication in facile talking than in silence.

The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, and ask no more than complicitous silence

Pierre Bourdieu

I have seen him set fire to his wigwam and smooth over the graves of his fathers... clap his hand in silence over his mouth, and take the last look over his fair hunting ground, and turn his face in sadness to the setting sun.

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

And in the afternoon they entered a land - but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay.

George Washington Cable

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.

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence.

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.

A small silence came between us, as precise as a picture hanging on the wall.

And now there is merely silence, silence, silence, saying All we did not know.

William Rose Benét

When something that honest is said it usually needs a few minutes of silence to dissipate.