Silence Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I know that you are looking for the Blue Bird, that is to say, the great secret of things and of happiness, so that Man may make our servitude still harder. … I do not hear the Animals... Where are they?... All this concerns them as much as us... We, the Trees, must not assume the responsibility alone for the grave measures that have become necessary... On the day when Man hears that we have done what we are about to do, there will be terrible reprisals... It is right, therefore, that our agreement should be unanimous, so that our silence may be the same...

Maurice Maeterlinck

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

Diane Setterfield

The big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion.

Cammie's going to be mad she missed this," Macey said to fill the silence. "Excuse me?" Hale asked. "Nothing." She shook her head. "I just...I have a friend who really likes air vents. And dumbwaiter shafts. And laundry chutes. Of course, the last time I was in a laundry chute, Cammie and I fell about a dozen stories..." "well, that sounds like fun." "it was either that or get kidnapped by terrorists, so I guess we got of easy.

Silence, much more powerful than before, much more shot through with the meaning of life and the accumulated wisdom of history.

James A. Michener

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

No idea stays pure. Even the flowering of art isn't pure. And the sun has spots. All geniuses menstruate. On sorrow floats laughter. In the heart of roaring lurks silence.

I don't like talking. I don't like people talking to me... Painting is silence.

He watched her retreat, his eyes lazy, and his body unmoving. A trickle of blood seeped slowly from the corner of his mouth. He let her get nearly out of the room before he spoke, I may not have the right, Silence, me love, he drawled so soft she nearly didn't catch the words. But I would've listened to ye. I would've believed ye.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that 'if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression', human rights should be protected by the rule of law. That just laws which uphold human rights are the necessary foundation of peace and security would be denied only by closed minds which interpret peace as the silence of all opposition and security as the assurance of their own power.

Aung San Suu Kyi

That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitable produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of bread and circuses can compensate for the damage done—these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence—because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society.

E. F. Schumacher

Finding true silence requires more than quieting our surroundings. It also means quieting our souls. This is the real dilemma of living in a wordy world.

Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.

I hate the common herd of men and keep them
afar. Let there be sacred silence: I, the Muses' priest, sing for girls and boys songs not heard before.

It was no mean trick doing the wiring with those mittens on. But I managed it and crawled out, batting spiders into the shadows. I could hear a thud as they hit the floor joists, then a scuttling sound, then, worst of all, the silence of spiders.

The Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth.

Donald Culross Peattie

Mind and night will meet, though in silence, like forbidden lovers.

Philip James Bailey

A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment," as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was "saturated with the bouquet of silence."

Holbrook Jackson

And through it all and afterwards they would be together, making their own world where nothing mattered but the things they could give to one another, the loveliness, the silence, and the peace.

Daphne du Maurier

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.

When little is done, little is said; silence is the mother of truth.

Benjamin Disraeli

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Silence never shows itself to so great an advantage, as when it is made the reply to calumny and defamation, provided that we give no just occasion for them.

Men point to the sad incidents of human life on earth, and they ask "Where is the love of God?" God points to that Cross as the unreserved manifestation of love so inconceivably infinite as to answer every challenge and silence all doubt for ever. And that Cross is not merely the public proof of what God has accomplished; it is the earnest of all that He has promised.

Robert Anderson

An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.