Motivational Quotes

Silence

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation. Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads on like a gray vegetation.

- Arp, Jean

Best Quotes about Silence

Silence is more musical than any song.

Christina Rossetti

X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.

Dickson, R A

Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.

Gaulle, Charles De

There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

There's nothing wrong with having nothing to say -- unless you insist on saying it.

Silence is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that come from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence. The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote, Only let the moving waters calm down, and the sun and moon will be reflected on the surface of your being.

Chopra, Deepak

Oppression can only survive through silence.

Carmen de Monteflores

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

Carlyle, Thomas

In silence man can most readily preserve his integrity.

Meister Eckhart

10.

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

Publilius Syrus

11.

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

Let us be silent that we may hear the whispers of the gods.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.

William Shakespeare

14.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

Eliot, George

15.

The rest is silence.

William Shakespeare

16.

There are grammatical errors even in his silence.

Stanislaw J. Lec

17.

Words are a heavy thing...they weigh you down. If birds talked, they couldn't fly.

Sy Rosen and Christian Williams

18.

It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they speak with the accent of natives they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.

Illich, Ivan

19.

It is great wisdom to know how to be silent and to look at neither the remarks, nor the deeds, nor the lives of others.

John of the Cross, St.

20.

Touch not the flute when drums are sounding around; when fools have the word, the wise will be silent.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

21.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

Sir Francis Bacon

22.

The Pause; that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it.

Twain, Mark

23.

These be three silent things: The Falling snow... the hour before the dawn... the mouth of one just dead.

Crapsey, Adelaide

24.

A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

Thomas Hardy

25.

He who does not know how to be silent will not know how to speak.

Ausonius

26.

Their silence is sufficient praise.

Terence

27.

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. [New Testament]

Bible

28.

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

Xenocrates of Chalcedon

29.

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

Josh Billings

30.

Sticks and stones are hard on bones aimed with angry art. Words can sting like anything but silence breaks the heart.

Mcginley, Phyllis

31.

The most profound statements are often said in silence.

Lynn Johnston

32.

Keep your mouth closed until your mind is in gear.

33.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.

Blaise Pascal

35.

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

37.

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

Plutarch

38.

Silence is the true friend that never betrays.

Confucius

39.

What she doesn't say is just as important as what she does say -- but there's so much more of it. I think from now on I'm going to stick to what she actually does say because I don't have that kind of time.

Katz, Jonathan

40.

I often regret that I have spoken; never that I have been silent.

Syrus, Publilius

41.

A silent mouth is melodious.

Proverb, Irish

42.

A wise old owl sat on an oak; The more he saw the less he spoke; The less he spoke the more he heard; Why aren't we like that wise old bird?

Richards, Edward Hersey

43.

Silence is the sanctuary of the prudent, it conceals not only secrets but also imperfections.

Zacharia

44.

A good word is an easy obligation; but not to speak ill, requires only our silence, which costs nothing.

John Tillotson

45.

The silent dog is the first to bite.

Proverb

46.

Silence is never more golden than when you hold it long enough to get all the facts before you speak.

47.

There is a wide difference between speaking to deceive, and being silent to be impenetrable.

Voltaire

48.

I went down with the ship but I kept my mouth shut so I didn't drown like the rest of them.

49.

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.

Mother Teresa

50.

I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.

Thoreau, Henry David