Silence Quotes
A man speaks of what he knows, a woman of what pleases her: the one requires knowledge, the other taste.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
My sister is also retarded. Across the board. She's a one hundred per cent, honest to goodness, born that way retard. I learned a long time ago that if you're going to tell a story about your retarded sister, you need to mention she's retarded right off the bat or inevitably, at the end of the story, someone will say, What... is she, retarded? And then you have to go, Uh... yeah, she is. Followed by a lengthy, awkward silence.
Bonnie McFarlane
Silence is the winding-sheet of the past: it is sometimes impious, often dangerous to raise it. But even when it is raised piously and lovingly, the first moment is a cruel one.
Alphonse de Lamartine
It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper.
Erica Jong
If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation.
Vaclav Havel
....it is not wise to keep the fire going under a slander unless you can get some large advantage out of keeping it alive. Few slanders can stand the wear of silence.
Mark Twain
What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and I don't know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily. I believe I should always be good if the sun always shone, and could enjoy myself very well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life in town offer in the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calm evenings I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the verandah steps, with the perfume of young larches all about, and the May moon hanging low over the beeches, and the beautiful silence made only more profound in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs and hooting of owls?
Elizabeth von Arnim
Personally, I think people need to get over this 'being offended' thing. Being offended does not give you the right to silence people. I get offended by things all the time - it's just part of life. The right not to be offended is not a human right, especially in a democracy.
Ben Miller
There are people and nations, Mother, that I would like to say to you by name. I entrust them to you in silence, I entrust them to you in the way that you know best.
Pope John Paul II
'For a word to be spoken,' Ged answered slowly, 'there must be silence. Before, and after.' Then all at once he got up, saying, 'I have no right to speak of these things. The word that was mine to say I said wrong. It is better that I keep still; I will not speak again. Maybe there is no true power but the dark.'
Ursula K. Le Guin
Silence is the pause in me when I am near to God.
Arvo Part
What is the meaning of the immense silence that surrounds the dead?
Ernst Junger
The only fit reply to a fit request is silence and the fact.
Dante Alighieri
Everyone who is grieved at anything, or discontented, is like a pig for sacrifice, kicking and squealing. Like a dove for sacrifice is he who laments in silence. Our one distinction is that it is given to us to consent, if we will, to the necessity imposed upon us.
Gene Wolfe
I agree with Proust in this, he says, that books create their own silences in ways that friends rarely do. And the silence that grows palpable when one has finished a canto of Dante, he says, is quite different from the silence that grows palpable when one has reached the end of Oedipus at Colonus. The most terrible thing that has happened to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened of silence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out... the fear of silence is the fear of loneliness, he says, and the fear of loneliness is the fear of silence. People fear silence, he says, because they have lost the ability to trust the world to bring about renewal. Silence for them means only the recognition that they have been abandoned... How can people find the strength to be happy if they are so terrified of silence?
Gabriel Josipovici
Not every truth is the better for showing its face undisguised; and often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed.
Pindar
They weave a slow andante as in sleep,Scaled yellow, swampy black, plague-spotted white;With blue and lidless eyes at watch they keepA treachery of silence; infinite.
Arthur Symons
How shall I ever tell Aunt Shaw?' she whispered, after some time of delicious silence. 'Let me speak to her.' 'Oh, no! I owe it to her, - but what will she say?' 'I can guess. Her first exclamation will be, "That man!" ' 'Hush!' said Margaret, 'or I shall try and show you your mother's indignant tones as she says, "That woman!"
Elizabeth Gaskell
What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.
Elie Wiesel
The silence of a friend commonly amounts to treachery. His not daring to say anything in our behalf implies a tacit censure.
William Hazlitt
