Quotes About Silence

Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don't have to tell anyone you're doing it.

Growing up, I wasn't as comfortable expressing myself as I am now, and I think that's why I chose acting: because it's acceptable to have your feelings. It's a place that they want you to feel. Whereas in life, growing up, it was 'Be quiet!' and 'Keep it to yourself.'

Between the uprightness of my conscience and the hardness of my lot, I know not how either to show respect to my feelings or to the times. The bitterness of my mind urges me at all hazards to speak what I think, whereas the necessity of the times prompts me, however unbecomingly, to keep silence. Good God! Which way shall I turn myself?

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the delight of life, which they are thenceforth to rule.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.

Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear.

I don't think we should speak so much. What if we were singing a song? We split, whilst singing.

Then they held my mouth shut for a while and hit me in the face, and with a whip across chest and back. I then collapsed, rolled on the floor, always keeping face down and no longer replied to any of their questions.

It is harder to kill a whisper than even a shouted calumny.

North Korea was pretty insane. Like the first thing my mom taught me was don't even whisper, the birds and mice could hear me. She told me the most dangerous thing that I had in my body was my tongue.

Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.

The denial of our duty to act in this case is a denial of our right to act; and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed the white slaves of the North, for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.

Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space.

The function of a briefing paper is to prevent the ambassador from saying something dreadfully indiscreet. I sometimes think its true object is to prevent the ambassador from saying anything at all.

Politicians pose and grip and grin, and mouth blandishments, and, like the beloved Arab leaders, are careful to say nothing. The prime photo op directive, it seems, is to say absolutely nothing.

If I told you all the people that have secretly told me I've influenced them, you'd never believe it, and you'll never see it in print, either.

I'll never put my memoirs in print.

From kindergarten, I knew that politics is something that you talk about only at home, because if you weren't quiet, your parents might be taken to prison. All Estonian families have these kind of stories.

Let those who know know, and let me keep what little privacy I can.

Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.

I was always taught to keep things private.

There's almost nothing that hasn't been said about me. But there's an awful lot that I haven't said. I don't talk about private things.