Quotes About Silence

It is better to hear than to speak.

If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man.

Why should I keep holiday / When other men have none? / Why but because, when these are gay, / I sit and mourn alone? / And why, when mirth unseals all tongues, / Should mine alone be dumb? / Ah! late I spoke to silent throngs, / And now their hour is come.

We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind.

Si la maldad y la vanidad usan el abrigo de la filantropía, ¿debería yo callar?

Far otherwise; your silence answers very loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have learned that you cannot help them; for, oracles speak. Doth not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her voice?

Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.

Those who know do not talk And talkers do not know."—Tao Te Ching

Ephrem the Syrian says, 'Good speech is silver, but silence is pure gold.' "—Way of a Pilgrim

To reconnect consciousness with the unconscious, to make consciousness symbolical is to reconnect words with silence; to let the silence in. If consciousness is all words and no silence, the unconscious remains unconscious."—N.O. Brown

The quieter you become the more you can hear.

I want you to remember, always, that no man who sits upon a throne likes to hear another man being praised. Never praise me in Bharata's presence or show how much you miss me. Don't speak of me at all before him.

They didn't finish each other's sentences, rather it was the pauses they shared.

Since I've learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.

If you cannot understand me in my speech, how can you understand me in my silence?

holding a book but reading the empty spaces.

To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes.

The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water.... The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water....

Kerosene, he said, because the silence had lengthened, is nothing but perfume to me.

Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said nothing. I am one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.

In the silence, our stage whisper might carry.

And the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those walls, the gibbering pack of tree apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud.

Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then. Now, it's too late.