Silence Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.

Martin Farquhar Tupper

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

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

"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.

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

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

Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Pierre Bourdieu

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

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.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

What a mysterious thing madness is. I have watched patients whose lips are forever sealed in a perpetual silence. They live, breathe, eat; the human form is there, but that something, which the body can live without, but which cannot exist without the body, was missing.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?

Robert Louis Stevenson

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

William Rose Benét

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

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

Who then tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does.

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

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

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