Motivational Quotes

Silence

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

Best Quotes about Silence

You are a slave to what you do say, a master of what you don't say.

I don't know whether to keep silent and let people think I am ignorant or open my mouth and release all doubts.

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

Blaise Pascal

The greatest admiration gives rise not to words, but to silence.

Musonnius

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

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

Those that are silent profess consent.

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

Hardy, Thomas

10.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.

11.

An inability to stay quiet is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

Bagehot, Walter

12.

It is a great thing to know the season for speech and the season for silence.

Seneca

13.

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

John Tillotson

14.

The silent influence of books, is a mighty power in the world; and there is a joy in reading them known only to those who read them with desire and enthusiasm. Silent, passive, and noiseless though they be, they yet set in action countless multitudes, and change the order of nations.

Giles, Henry

15.

I am better able to retract what I did not say than what I did.

Gabirol, Ibn

16.

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?

Marceau, Marcel

17.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

18.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

19.

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

20.

The rest is silence.

William Shakespeare

21.

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

William Shakespeare

22.

Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself, and know that everything in this life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

23.

An now the silences come in a single lifetime, in a single year... when species die, leaving a silent space in the world song that can never be filled.

Delint, Charles

24.

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

Beckett, Samuel

25.

With silence favor me. (Favete Linguis)

Horace

26.

Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.

Gaulle, Charles De

27.

Silence may be golden, but can you think of a better way to entertain someone than to listen to him?

Young, Brigham

28.

Sometimes a whisper speaks volumes.

Sheddan, Scott

29.

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

Ausonius

30.

Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.

Mcginley, Phyllis

31.

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

Xenocrates of Chalcedon

32.

Their silence is sufficient praise.

Terence

33.

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

34.

Silence is more musical than any song.

Christina Rossetti

35.

Silence is argument carried on by other means.

Guevara, Che

36.

When thou art quiet and silent, then art thou as God was before nature and creature; thou art that which God then wats; thou art that whereof he made thy nature and creature: Then thou hearest and seest even with that wherewith God himself saw and heard in thee, before every thine own willing or thine own seeing began.

Boehme, Jacob

37.

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

38.

Oppression can only survive through silence.

Carmen de Monteflores

39.

The man who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

There are grammatical errors even in his silence.

Stanislaw J. Lec

41.

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

Sy Rosen and Christian Williams

42.

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

Publilius Syrus

43.

There are times when silence has the loudest voice.

Brownlow, Leroy

44.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

45.

A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

Thomas Hardy

46.

Not merely an absence of noise, Real Silence begins when a reasonable being withdraws from the noise in order to find peace and order in his inner sanctuary.

Peter Minard

47.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

48.

The silent dog is the first to bite.

Proverb

49.

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

Crapsey, Adelaide

50.

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