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).
Not even your Britain's groans can pierce
The leaden silence of your hearse.
Silence is treason. That is why I have spoken, why I speak and why I shall continue to speak.
They kept it up until the very end. Only the engulfing ocean had power to drown them into silence.
It is Ill-manners to silence a Fool, and Cruelty to let him go on.
—true love is like religion, it hath its silence and its sanctity.
In Vanya's family, silence had never meant surrender, only tactical retreat.