silence Quotes

“You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.”

“The rest, is silence.”

For all evils there are two remedies - time and silence.

Not being heard is no reason for silence.

“We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other’s mouths. In this way we exchanged names from bed to bed: “Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.”

“The air was full of all the night noises that, taken together, make one big silence.”

“It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.”

“Judge with logic and reason, but comment not.”

“I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.”

“For an instant he sat in silent amazement. Then he burst into a hearty laugh.”

“Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best becomes you.”

“Peace! I will stop your mouth.”

“She said nothing, and Sir Andrew too was silent, yet those two young people understood one another, as young people have a way of doing all the world over, and have done since the world began.”

“But when weariness finally forced him to be silent, he was no longer of use to his tormentors, and they sought amusement elsewhere.”

“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.”

Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.

Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

“When you have something to say, silence is a lie.”

“Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

“We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.”

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

“Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.”

“Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification.”

“Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.”

“What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?”

“It is easier not to say anything. Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say.”

“He says a million things without saying a word. I make a note to study David Petrakis. I have never heard a more eloquent silence.”

“Monster! thy silence would incense a flint.”

“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”

“When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep. When I was supposed to sleep, I was silent. When a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it.”

“Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled.”

“Reb Saunders sat back slowly in his chair. And from his lips came a soft, tremulous sigh. He was silent for a moment, his eyes wide, dark, brooding, gazing upon his son. He nodded his head once, as if in final acknowledgment of his tortured victory.”

“If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.”

“[My father] taught me with silence. . .to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. . . . One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain … by turning inside oneself. . . . It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe.”

“Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.”

“I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.”

“I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.”

“‘Where there is no experience, I believe the wise man is silent.’”

“The house is silent now and she feels like a stranger here. ‘This life was never ours,’ she whispers to the dog, who has been following her from room to room, and Luli wags her tail and stares at Miranda with wet brown eyes. ‘We were only ever borrowing it.’”

“The corridor was silent. It was necessary to walk very slowly, her hand on the wall. A man was curled on his side near the elevators, shivering. She wanted to speak to him, but speaking would take too much strength, so she looked at him instead—I see you, I see you—and hoped this was enough.”

“Your silence speaks volumes.”

“There was a silence—a comfortable replete silence. Into that silence came The Voice. Without warning, inhuman, penetrating . . . ‘Ladies and gentlemen! Silence, please! . . . You are charged with the following indictments.‘”

″‘Most people don’t know how to appreciate silence. They can’t help talking.”

“It is eerily terrifying that there is no sound when a heart breaks. Car accidents end with a bang, falling ends with a thud, even writing makes the scratching sound of pencil against paper. But the sound of a heart breaking is completely silent.”

“The English! They expect you to fight for them but won’t talk to you. Singh. And the ambiguities.”

“Smeagol promises to Precious, promises faithfully. Never come again, never speak, no never!”

“‘Rabbit’s clever,’ said Pooh thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ said Piglet, ‘Rabbit’s clever.’ ‘And he has Brain.’ ‘Yes,’ said Piglet, ‘Rabbit has Brain.’ There was a long silence. ‘I suppose,’ said Pooh, ‘that that’s why he never understands anything.‘”

“Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over.”

“Strained silence, so I deem, Is no less ominous than excessive grief.”

“Look! Her wedding ring slipped – she had grown so thin. It was she who suffered – but she had nobody to tell.”

“In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.”

″‘See what a fine fisherman is my son! He will be a chief one of these days.’ Only Tavana Nui would be silent. His son had not gone.”

“Mafatu wanted to cry out after him: ‘Wait, Kana! I’ll go! I’ll try-‘. But the words would not come. Kana had gone.”

“The palms, trooping to the edge of the beach, were motionless in the night air. All the world seemed to hold its breath as this boy climbed up out of the sea.”

“But silence, do you hear me? Silence upon the whole subject; and let no one get before us in this design of discovering the center of the earth.”

“Darkness devours every shining day. Darkness demands and always has its way. Darkness listens, watches, waits. Darkness claims the day and celebrates. Sometimes in silence darkness comes. Sometimes with a gleeful banging of drums.”

“Silence creates its own violence.”

“The air was strangely quiet. All the noises of the city were muted here into a distant hum, so unceasing that it seemed to belong to silence.”

“All of them stood in silence for a moment and looked at HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR written in shaky red letters on the wallpaper over Theodora’s bed.”

“We reached for each other, and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake loving him in silence.”

“he said: ‘My fate, O King, led me hither, through perils such as few even of the Elves would dare. And here I have found what I sought not indeed, but finding I would possess for ever. For it is above all gold and silver, and beyond all jewels. Neither rock, nor steel, nor the fires of Morgoth, nor all the powers of the Elf-kingdoms, shall keep from me the treasure that I desire. For Luthien your daughter is the fairest of all the Children of the World.’ Then silence fell upon the hall...”

“When negative thoughts come, the key is to never verbalize them.”

“We often sit together at my kitchen table. The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us—we couldn’t use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.”

“Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. ”

“Grandma’s house was the last one in town. Next to the row of glads was a woven-wire fence, and on the other side of that a cornfield. On the first nights I’d always lie up in bed, listening to the husky whisper of the dry August corn in the fields. Then on the second night I wouldn’t hear anything.”

“Read this to yourself. Read it silently. Don’t move your lips. Don’t make a sound. Listen to yourself. Listen without hearing anything. What a wonderfully weird thing, huh?”

“This was a place of deep silence and brooding shadows, and the gods who lived here had no names.”

“Bowman could bear no more. He jerked out the last unit, and Hal was silent forever.”

“She was inside this silence and she was safe. ”

“Most people have no idea that tragedy and silence often have the exact same address.”

“Silence is the simple stillness of the individual under the Word of God… Silence is nothing else but waiting for God’s Word and coming from God’s Word with a blessing.”

“The world was so silent. There was a barrier between me and the world, and I thought for a moment that the world had never wanted me and now it was taking the opportunity to get rid of me.”

“The silence was an intense roar.”

″‘The most intelligent of creatures,’ he offers softly, ‘often make the fewest sounds.‘”

“Before now, and for quite some time, we maintained our decorum and suffered in silence whatever you men did, because you wouldn’t let us make a sound.”

“They knew their voices broke a silence of a thousand million years, the silence of wind and leaves and wind, blowing and ceasing and blowing again.”

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of the opinion is, that it is robbing the human race.”

“Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.”

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

“By the time she reached her fifties, she was ageless—and, with her constant silence, her upright figure and her measured gestures, she seemed like a woman made out of wood, a kind of automaton that moved without thinking. ”

“I’ve excluded happiness as one of those possibilities we seek for ourselves. Oh, I still want it, but that’s beside the point. Contentment - they say it’s the ultimate, but I can’t even wish for that. I don’t even want the desire to be content. I can only hope for silence.”

“Real love is silent as well as blind.”

″... we had taken his silence as a sort of encouragement; necessarily, then, this talk of his was a disappointment to us, for it showed we had made no impression upon him... we knew then how the missionary must feel when he has been cherishing a glad hope and has seen it blighted.”

“My mom told me that I should trust the man who could see the sorrow behind my smile, the love behind my anger, and the reasons behind my silence.”

“A wise man is not showy about his wisdom; he guards it carefully. He is silent when he comes to a stranger’s home. The wise man seldom wanders into harm, for you can never have a more faithful friend than a good supply of wisdom.”

“I wanted to be able to tell you the exact moment I fell in love with you. But I can’t do that.” “You can’t?” A pin could have dropped in the grass and it would have been heard in that moment as everyone grew perfectly silent to listen for his reply.”

“The two families rode in silence through the deserted streets to the field he warned, ‘Remember not a word from any of you.’ The guard recognized him as the chief test pilot for the new spaceship. ‘My family and some friends are coming down to watch me take off,’ he told the guard.”

“At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. [...] As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like a the shock of a cannon - then all is darkness and silence!”

“Now, Daisy, I want us to work out a signal system of communication. When I elbow you real hard in the face, that means: shut up.”

“But the peach...ah, yes...the peach was a soft, stealthy traveler, making no noise as it floated along. And several times during that long silent night ride high up over the middle of the ocean in the moonlight, James and his friends saw things that no one had ever seen before.”

“Dead silence along the street. The kid had done the unthinkable, he had chomped on one of Mars’s own bars. Not only that, but white kids just didn’t put their mouths where black kids had had theirs, be it soda bottles, spoons, or candy bars. And the kid hadn’t even gone for the unused end; he had chomped right over Mars Bar’s own bite marks.”

“She tugged again, and all at once was aware of another of those sudden woodland silences which always spell a warning.”

“Soft and silent, she swooped through the trees to Sarah and Percy and Bill.”

“The elephants were standing absolutely still. Elmer had never seen them so serious before. The more he looked at the serious, silent, still, standing elephants, the more he wanted to laugh.”

“I was conditioned to believe any boundary I wanted was a betrayal of her, so I stayed silent. Cooperative.”

“The prophet shows that, for the sake of silence, we are to abstain even from good talk. If this be so, how much more needful is it that we refrain from evil words, on account of the penalty of the sin!”

“Even the silence has a story to tell you. Just listen. Listen.”

“A morning when you become a pure vessel For what wants to ascend from silence,”

“I shall be like my mother, silent in a blue apron locking up the cupboards.”

“There’s a brief moment of silence for what we’ve lost. And in that moment, it ends. Finally. The past of us officially comes to an end.”

“But then a sudden terrible silence like suffocation came, blotting out all sound of the storm. In the moment of its last desperate chance, breaking across the barrier that had been holding it at bay, the Dark came for Will. Shutting out the sky and the earth, the deadly spinning pillar came at him, dreadful in its furious whirling energy and utter quiet. There was no time for fear. Will stood alone. ”

“They walked as old friends walk, without often speaking, sharing the kind of silence that is not so much silence as a kind of still communication. Their footsteps rang out on the bare wet road, making the only sound anywhere in the village except the song of a blackbird and, somewhere further off, the sound of someone shoveling.”

“My face was burned with shame. Sitting there and not answering was like begging. And why should I beg? I had done nothing to anybody.”

″‘Bisa Bea, do you want to come out and play with us?’ She didn’t exactly give me an answer, but I knew she was dying to go out and play. First, silence means consent. Then I only had to look into her eyes to see how brightly they shone when I mentioned the idea.”

“For if I am Bilgewater the Hideous, quaint and barmy, my father is certainly William the Silent.”

“With a pleasant feeling of companionship, a sense that she was not the only living creature awake in this dark world, Griselda lay listening, contentedly enough, for the sweet, fresh notes of the cuckoo’s friendly greeting. But before it sounded again through the silent house she was once more fast asleep. And this time she slept till daylight had found its way into all but the very darkest nooks and crannies of the ancient dwelling.”

″ ‘What must be, must be. The luck of the house hangs on that clock. Its maker spent a good part of his life over it, and his last words were that it would bring good luck to the house that owned it, but that trouble would follow its silence. It’s my belief,’ she added solemnly, ‘that it’s a fairy clock, neither more nor less, for good luck it has brought there’s no denying.’ ”

“Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death’s house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is.”

“Then silence, and stillness, and night were the universe.”

“Charlotte and Emily wore gloves and carried prayerbooks, as did everyone. They were meant to keep silence on their way. ‘It’s so that we can think holy thoughts for church, you see,’ Bunty explained. ‘Not that I ever seem to have any.‘”

“The silence between us hung heavy with all the things we couldn’t say. All the things we knew without them being said out loud.”

“Money is power. Money is strength and safety. Even silence has to be paid for.”

“Nothing else was said until we came to the bend in the road where you can first see the Hanging Rock coming up out of the trees in the distance. I pointed it out to her and said something about the Rock having made a lot of trouble for a lot of people since the day of the Picnic. She leaned right across me and shook her fist at it and I hope I never have to see an expression like that on another face.”

“Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind.”

“Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all by themselves with no help from the mind.”

“depression is silent you never hear it coming and suddenly it’s the loudest voice in your head”

“The sound of the living room clock striking midnight could not reach them; they never had permission to speak at all, and they lay in silence until another year had passed and they stood once more beneath the tree.”

“The captain did not even glance in her direction. Kit was not used to being ignored, and her temper flared. When a thin whimper from the child was silenced by a vicious cuff, her anger boiled over. Without a second’s deliberation she acted. Kicking off her buckled shoes and dropping the woolen cloak, she plunged headlong over the side of the boat.”

“But all these human beings together are as a handful of sand upon the ocean shores, and for the most part there is silence and solitude and an uninterrupted way of life for the wild animals that abound there...”

“Alfanhui would have been unable to say whether there was a dark solitude in his eyes and an unfathomable silence in his ears because the music and the colors came from that other place from which concrete knowledge never comes, a place abandoned on the very first day behind the farthermost wall of memory where that other memory is born;”

“The fog of silence and solitude vanished, and forgotten visions awoke as the music of the wind and the rain met the dead colors of the birds.”

“And when Thorkell came to the village, men were silent until he gave them word to speak. Even the old warriors, men who had killed bears in the high summer on the mountain tops.”

“Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer.”

“She had the power of silent sympathy. That sounds rather dull, I know, but it’s not so dull as it sounds. It just means that a person is able to know that you are unhappy, and to love you extra on that account, without bothering you by telling you all the time how sorry she is for you.”

“How wise are little children who see and are silent!”

“Poirot was silent. But it was not a modest silence. His eyes seemed to be saying: ‘You are wrong. They didn’t allow for Hercule Poirot.‘”

“Now don’t talk while I think.”

Antony was silent, and since it is difficult to keep up a conversation with a silent man for any length of time, Bill had dropped into silence too. Or rather, he hummed to himself, hit at thistles in the grass with his stick and made uncomfortable noises with his pipe.

Cayley seemed very fond of them that night. After dinner was over, he suggested a stroll outside. They walked up and down the gravel in front of the house, saying very little to each other, until Bill could stand it no longer. For the last twenty turns he had been slowing down hopefully each time they came to the door, but the hint had always been lost on his companions, and each time another turn had been taken.

What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him—yea, compel him, as it were—to add hypocrisy to sin?

Joe sat next Biddy, and I sat next Joe in the corner opposite my sister. The more I looked into the glowing coals, the more incapable I became of looking at Joe; the longer the silence lasted, the more unable I felt to speak.

They seemed to have realised his good intention and had only been alarmed briefly. Now they all looked at him in unhappy silence.

“Silence, thou man’s cub!”

“He tried to get Becky to talk, but her sorrows were too oppressive, all her hopes were gone.”