Silence Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Elie Wiesel

Colette

Aldous Huxley

Mother Teresa

Pindar

Edith Sitwell

Martin Farquhar Tupper

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.

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.

For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it

The anti-slavery cause had come to break stronger fetters than those that held the slave. The idea of equal rights was in the air. The wail of the slave, his clanking fetters, his utter need, appealed to everybody. Women heard. Angelina and Sara Grimki and Abby Kelly went out to speak for the slaves. Such a thing had never been heard of. An earthquake shock could hardly have startled the community more. Some of the abolitionists forgot the slave in their efforts to silence the women. The Anti-Slavery Society rent itself in twain over the subject. The Church was moved to its very foundation in opposition.

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

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

Pierre Bourdieu

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.

Much advance publicity was made for the address the Master would deliver on The Destruction of the World and a large crowd gathered at the monastery grounds to hear him.
The address was over in less than a minute. All he said was:
"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

Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.

Khaled Hosseini

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

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

Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

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

"The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint." Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my house your inn." Inns are not residences.

Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Nature's music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions.

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.

Martin Farquhar Tupper

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

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

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

But please remember, especially in these times of group-think and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended.

But the child's sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning