Motivational Quotes

Silence

'Tis best to be silent in a bad cause.

- Ovid

Best Quotes about 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

Silence is argument carried on by other means.

Guevara, Che

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

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

Josh Billings

Silence is more musical than any song.

Christina Rossetti

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

'Tis best to be silent in a bad cause.

Ovid

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

Hubbard, Kin

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

10.

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

11.

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

Dickson, R A

12.

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

John Tillotson

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Shakespeare, William

16.

When the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber.

Churchill, Winston

17.

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

William Penn

18.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

19.

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

Bagehot, Walter

20.

Silence is the true friend that never betrays.

Confucius

21.

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

Sy Rosen and Christian Williams

22.

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.

23.

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

Syrus, Publilius

24.

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

Ausonius

25.

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

26.

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

Samuel Johnson

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Smith, Sydney

30.

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

Beaumont, Francis

31.

A silent mouth is melodious.

Proverb, Irish

32.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

33.

Sometimes silence is not golden -- just yellow.

34.

Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.

Gaulle, Charles De

35.

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

Zacharia

36.

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

Xenocrates of Chalcedon

37.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.

Huxley, Aldous

38.

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

39.

Silence is a text easy to misread.

A. A. Attanasio

40.

With silence favor me. (Favete Linguis)

Horace

41.

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

William Shakespeare

42.

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

43.

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

Crapsey, Adelaide

44.

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

45.

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

Bible

46.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques