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).
No one wanted to betray his admiration. There was silence for a time.
The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind.
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence.
I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
I can but die... and I believe in God. Let me try and wait His will in silence.
We wake and whisper awhile,
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields
Of amaranth lie.
What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
«Silence is the space that has yet to be resolved where the dynamics of thinking and deciding».