Silence Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

In the '70s Prague was pewter gray in spirit, broken and oddly adrift in the middle of Europe. The most golden thing about it then was its silence. Loneliness was its chief allure, radiating a sullen romance bred of cigarette smoke and satire.

And when the echoes had ceased, like a sense of pain was the silence.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Come on, Ella. Sleep green.' Ignoring him, I got into bed wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts printed with penguins. I reached over to the nightstand and flipped off the lamp. A moment of silence, and then I heard a lecherous murmur. 'I like your penguins.

Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn't an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.

I ejaculated about ten minutes ago and the stuff was black. So everything is not normal." Silence greeted that happy little announcement. Man, if he had hauled off and sucker-punched V, he would have gotten less of a shocked-out reaction.

From the beginning of the year to the end, day and night, morning and evening, in action and repose, in speech and in silence, the warrior must keep death constantly before him and have ever in mind that the one death [which he has to give] should not be suffered in vain. In other words [he must have perfect control over his own death] just as if he were holding an intemperate steed in rein. Only he who truly keeps death in mind this way can understand what is meant by [Yamaga Soko's maxim of] "preparedness."

Today I read your autobiography in two volumes, Living My Life. These two books full of life, shocked me greatly. Your roaring of forty years like spring thunder, knocked at the door of my living grave throughout the whole book. At this time, silence lost its effect, the fire of my life was lit, I want to come to life and go through great anguish, immeasurable joy, dark despair and enthusiastic hope, throughout the peak and the abyss of life. I will calmly go on living with an attitude you taught me until I spend my whole life.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

Silence is the surest resolve for him who distrusts himself.

François de La Rochefoucauld

No matter how grave the secret, how imperative absolute silence, someone would always feel the urge to confess, and an unleashed secret is a terrible force.

I couldn't have done it otherwise, gone on I mean. I could not have gone on through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how;
Everything is happy now,
Everything is upward striving;
'Tis as easy now for the heart to be true
As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,—
'Tis the natural way of living:
Who knows whither the clouds have fled?
In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake;
And the eyes forget the tears they have shed,
The heart forgets its sorrow and ache;
The soul partakes the season's youth,
And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe
Lie deep 'neath a silence pure and smooth,
Like burnt-out craters healed with snow.

James Russell Lowell

Edwards is like a politician who keeps announcing that he will not use his opponent's criminal record for partisan political advantage.
Manifestly, I was not making fun of their son's death; I was making fun of John Edwards' incredibly creepy habit of invoking his son's tragic death to advance his political career — a practice so repellant, it even made John Kerry queasy.
I'm a little tired of losers trying to raise campaign cash or TV ratings off of my coattails, particularly when they use their afflictions or bereavement schedules to try to silence the opposition.

O'er the fields of space together following her flying traces,
In a radiant tumult thronging, suns and stars and myriad races
Mount the spirit spires of beauty, reaching onward to the day
When the Shepherd of the Ages draws his misty hordes away
Through the glimmering deeps to silence, and within the awful fold
Life and joy and love forever vanish as a tale is told,
Lost within the mother's being. So the vision flamed and fled,
And before the glory fallen every other dream lay dead.
The Master Singer

George William Russell

Words are supposed to hurt. That's considered a legitimate way of fighting things out. And what did it replace in the historical scene? It replaced actual violence. Words are supposed to be free so we CAN actually fight things out, in the battleplace of ideas, so we don't end up fighting them out in civil wars. If we try to legitimately ban anything can hurt someone's feelings, everyone is reduced to silence.

Four billion people on this earth, but my imagination is still the same. It's bad with large numbers. It's still taken by particularity. It flits in the dark like a flashlight, illuminating only random faces while all the rest go blindly by, never coming to mind and never really missed.... I can't tell you how much I pass over in silence.

Wisława Szymborska

The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation.

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

Publilius Syrus

Isabel had gone silent in a way that shouted the silence to me.

Maggie Stiefvater

The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plan blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?

Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

J.D. cleared his throat and pushed the button on the intercom. Uh, Payton, hi. It's J.D. Dead silence. Then another crackle. Sorry. Not interested. Cute. But J.D. persisted. Again with the button. I want to talk to you. Crackle. Ever hear of a telephone, asshole? Okay, he probably deserved that.

See for me, it's immediate. Silence is so freaking loud.' This seemed either deep or deeply oxymoronic. I wasn't sure which.

To-day's house makes tomorrow's road;
I knew these heaps of stone
When they were walls of grace and might,
The country's honour, art's delight
That over fountain'd silence show'd
Fame's final bastion.

There was a fifteen-second patch of silence, then Craig said, 'Isn't it weird that Hotmail accounts still exist?' 'It really is,' said Bev.

Douglas Coupland