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).
There was silence deep as death,
And the boldest held his breath,
For a time.
There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture.
But let me silent be:
For silence is the speech of love,
The music of the spheres above.
Silence is the genius of fools and one of the virtues of the wise.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.
Silence is only commendable
In a neat's tongue dried and a maid not vendible.