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

Oppression can only survive through silence.

Carmen de Monteflores

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

Crapsey, Adelaide

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

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

William Shakespeare

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.

Martin Fraquhar Tupper

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

Voltaire

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

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

Zacharia

It ain't a bad plan to keep still occasionally even when you know what you're talking about.

Hubbard, Kin

10.

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

11.

A silent mouth is melodious.

Proverb, Irish

12.

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

13.

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

14.

In silence man can most readily preserve his integrity.

Meister Eckhart

15.

With silence favor me. (Favete Linguis)

Horace

16.

Learn taciturnity and let that be your motto!

Burns, Robert

17.

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

18.

Not to ask is not be denied.

Dryden, John

19.

Silence is golden when you can't think of a good answer.

Muhammad Ali

20.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

21.

Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.

Gaulle, Charles De

22.

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

Sy Rosen and Christian Williams

23.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

Abraham Lincoln

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Bagehot, Walter

27.

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

28.

Arp, Jean

29.

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

30.

When the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber.

Churchill, Winston

31.

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

32.

The silent dog is the first to bite.

Proverb

33.

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

Shakespeare, William

34.

Silence is a text easy to misread.

A. A. Attanasio

35.

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

Plutarch

36.

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

Beckett, Samuel

37.

If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it.

Coolidge, Calvin

38.

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

39.

There are times when silence has the loudest voice.

Brownlow, Leroy

40.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

41.

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

Xenocrates of Chalcedon

42.

'Tis best to be silent in a bad cause.

Ovid

43.

It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it.

Beaumont, Francis

44.

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

Dickson, R A

45.

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

46.

A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

Thomas Hardy

47.

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.

Gibran, Kahlil

48.

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

William Penn

49.

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