Silence Quotes

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation ... Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.

Jean Arp

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

E. M. Cioran

The words the happy say are paltry melody but those the silent feel are beautiful.

Emily Dickinson

Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.

Edward Hoagland

And Silence, like a poultice, comes to heal the blows of sound.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?

Marcel Marceau

Sticks and stones are hard on bones. Aimed with angry art, words can sting like anything. But silence breaks the heart.

Phyllis McGinley

Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.

Publilius Syrus

I do know of these that therefore only are reputed wise for saying nothing.

William Shakespeare

Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

Igor Stravinsky

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass - grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence ... We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Mother Teresa

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Henry David Thoreau