quotations about silence
He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue.
HENRY ADAMS
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The Education of Henry Adams
To enjoy silence is a rare faculty. There are those who scarcely know what it means. They live in a world of reverberation. Even when they are alone their consciousness is noisy. If we had eyes fine enough to look in and to see what was going on we should find that they were always in a turmoil. They usually have a way of putting their idlest thoughts into words. To live with them may be a great trial. They trivialize life. They spread about them an atmosphere of fatigue. Their thinking is always on the surface, where they habitually live. The truth is that they have no time to do any real thinking. They never familiarize themselves with silence, where the real thinking is done, the thinking that goes down to the depths. As a rule, they cannot bear to be alone. No wonder. They have only the company of their strident thoughts clamoring to wear themselves out in words.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Silence", Reactions and Other Essays
Silence often enables us to see other people's imperfections, and helps us to conceal our own, but people with whom we associate might reasonably suspect us of emptiness if we indulge our inclination for silence on all occasions.
WALTER MATTHEWS
"Silence and Concentration", Human Life from Many Angles
Let us sculpt in hopeless silence all our dreams of speaking.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
Behind the word is silence. Behind that silence is forgetfulness.
GIANNINA BRASCHI
Empire of Dreams
Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.
NORTON JUSTER
The Phantom Tollbooth
There is a silence, the child of love, which expresses everything, and proclaims more loudly than the tongue is able to do; there are movements that are involuntary proofs of what the soul feels.
VITTORIO ALFIERI
attributed, Forty Thousand Quotations, Prose and Poetical
Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
Fear of the unknown
Is bad enough, yeah
But saying nothing
Says so much
COREY GLOVER
"Silence"
It's hard to put a foot in a shut mouth.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Silence is so freaking loud.
SARAH DESSEN
Just Listen
The true genius shudders at incompleteness -- imperfection -- and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
Marginalia
Silence is one of the hardest kinds of arguments to refute.
H. W. SHAW
attributed, Day's Collacon
In silence the heart raves. It utters words
Meaningless, that never had
A meaning.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
"True Love"
What has this world become
Silence has made us numb
CAROUSEL KINGS
"Silence"
Empty afternoons of silence
Only the whirl of fans
Cutting through the air
SOCORRO PASCO
"Empty Afternoons of Silence", In the Silence of Dreaming and Selected Poems
Silence is the genius of fools and one of the virtues of the wise.
BERNARD DE BONNARD
attributed, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
Silence, when nothing need be said, is the eloquence of discretion.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Sartor Resartus
It's not the reasoning
It's not the logic
It's not the questions
Third degree
It's not acceptance
No, it's not defiance
It's the silence
COREY GLOVER
"Silence"