Silence Quotes
Silence is a topic where the shortest lines do best. Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” closes the Tractatus (1922), and de Gaulle, in Le Fil de l’épée (1932), says nothing builds up authority like silence. Longfellow’s Evangeline (1847) has sorrow and silence both strong, with patient endurance godlike.
Two sayings are credited to Publilius Syrus and marked disputed: that he has often regretted his speech and never his silence, and that one should be silent or say something better than silence. “Silence is the wit of fools, and one of the virtues of the wise” is credited to Anatole France and flagged misattributed. The notes trace it to an eighteenth-century poem, Bernard de Bonnard’s “Le Silence,” in the Almanach des Muses (1776).
Silence is the speech of love,
The music of the spheres above.
The gray silence, the gray waves, the gray wastes of the sea.
There are many justifications of silence; there can be none of insincerity.
The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.
If we accept the silence that is given to us, we will never move the world ahead.
The problem at the moment, in the PD, is not the difference in ideas but the silence of ideas.