Quotes About Silence

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

The rule is that when we know the answer, we do not ask the question.

The hush comes with the deepening of Autumn; but it comes gradually. Our ears are attuned to it, day by quieter day. But even now, if one awakens in the deep darkness of the small hours, one can hear it, a foretaste of Winter silence. It's a little painful now, and a little lonely because it is so strange.

Let sleeping gods lie.

I definitely I prefer to sing in the car. I don't sing in the shower, maybe its because that's the one time I don't need to talk to anyone so I should just shut up, otherwise I'm just, you know, jibber jabber.

So, what do you do? - Nothing. - What kind of nothing? - The nothing kind of nothing.

My mouth tastes like all the things I should have said.

I keep a pistol when I sleep -inside my mouth so I don't fight my tongue -for saying all these things, like how I saw you in my dreams.

My mouth tastes like all the things I should have said. I don't want to be this way, but I have been since you left.

I went to my son's graduation this weekend, and I heard a great quote I've never heard before from Albert Einstein. It was that the greatest danger to the world is not the bad people but it's the good people who don't speak out.

We sit huddled together for a few minutes, just being there with one another, and it feels dangerous to me that nobody is saying anything.

And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language

Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.

That silence is one of the great arts of conversation is allowed by Cicero himself, who says, there is not only an art, but even an eloquence in it.

Wo es hinkam, wuchs aus der Nacht ein kleinstes Geräusch. Knirschte hell eine Diele, löste sich ein Nagel, bog sich ein altes Möbel. Knarrte es in den verquollenen Läden oder klirrte seltsam zwischen den Gläsern – Alles schlief in dem grossen Hause am Rhein. Aber irgend etwas schlurfte langsam herum –

Where words fail, music speaks.

Adoration is love overwhelmed by the beauty, the power, the immense grandeur of the loved object. Love then falls into a kind of faint, into a full and profound silence. It is also the final effort of a soul that is overflowing and can no longer speak."   ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY

Sometimes the loudest cries for help are silent.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

They would walk in silence to Adams House, and Elgin would sign Caroline in at the policeman's room. In silence they would mount the stairs, and Elgin would unlock the door of his room, and then they would fall into each other's arms, sometimes giggling with relief, sometimes sombre, sometimes almost crying with the joy of this privacy and this embrace. Then

Lincoln's "campaign" for president ended how and where it began: in adamant silence, and in the same Illinois city to which he had so tenaciously clung since the national convention. Like the solar eclipse that had obscured the Illinois sun in July, Lincoln remained in Springfield, hidden in full view.

An enthusiastic reader of English poetry, Lincoln forgot or ignored Dryden's warning from "Astraea Redux": "An horrid stillness first invades the ear,/ And in that silence we the tempest fear.

Saying nothing was preferable to saying too much. Well versed in the Bible, Lincoln may also have remembered the lines from Isaiah: "You silence the uproar of foreigners; as heat is reduced by the shadow of a cloud, so the song of the ruthless is stilled."102

I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.