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).
Aphorisms respect the wisdom of silence by disturbing it, but briefly.
When we began, we had no opportunities; we prepared in silence and created our own opportunity.
Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear.
How is this? Ought not the petitioner to speak first, and the conqueror to listen in silence?
Nor does it impose silence on this sex which does not deserve to be despised.