Motivational Quotes

Silence

Silence is the true friend that never betrays.

- Confucius

Best Quotes about Silence

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

John Tillotson

If you keep your mouth shut you will never put your foot in it.

O'Malley, Austin

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.

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

Keep your mouth closed until your mind is in gear.

Not to ask is not be denied.

Dryden, John

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

He had occasional flashes of silence that made his conversation perfectly delightful.

Smith, Sydney

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

10.

Learn taciturnity and let that be your motto!

Burns, Robert

11.

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

Bagehot, Walter

12.

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

Dickson, R A

13.

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

Hubbard, Kin

14.

Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish.

Colton, Charles Caleb

15.

It is better to be silent, and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.

Engel, Silvan

16.

The rest is silence.

William Shakespeare

17.

Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding. [Proverbs 17:28]

Bible

18.

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

William Penn

19.

When the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber.

Churchill, Winston

20.

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

Seneca

21.

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

22.

Consider the whale: It never gets into trouble until it comes up and starts spouting.

23.

The whisper of a pretty girl can be heard further than the roar of a lion.

Proverb, Arabian

24.

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

Hardy, Thomas

25.

There are times when silence has the loudest voice.

Brownlow, Leroy

26.

'Tis best to be silent in a bad cause.

Ovid

27.

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

Gabirol, Ibn

28.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

Sir Francis Bacon

29.

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

Voltaire

30.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

31.

The most profound statements are often said in silence.

Lynn Johnston

32.

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

33.

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

Sy Rosen and Christian Williams

34.

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

35.

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

Blaise Pascal

36.

Silence is a text easy to misread.

A. A. Attanasio

37.

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

Beaumont, Francis

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.

Samuel Johnson

41.

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

42.

Sometimes a whisper speaks volumes.

Sheddan, Scott

43.

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

44.

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

Xenocrates of Chalcedon

45.

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.

Martin Fraquhar Tupper

46.

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

47.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation, as allowed by Cicero himself, who says,'there is not only an art, but an eloquence in it.'A well bred woman may easily and effectually promote the most useful and elegant conversation without speaking a word. The modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence.

Tom Blair

48.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

49.

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

Marceau, Marcel

50.

There are grammatical errors even in his silence.

Stanislaw J. Lec