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).
Some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.
Behind the word is silence, and behind that silence is forgetfulness.
But my words like silent raindrops fell, and echoed in the wells of silence.
And they three passed over the white sands, between the rocks, silent as the shadows.
Said Periander, "Hesiod might as well have kept his breath to cool his pottage."
All Heaven and Earth are still, though not in sleep,
But breathless, as we grow when feeling most.
Silence is the perfectest herald of joy:
I were but little happy, if I could say how much.
A horrid stillness first invades the ear,
And in that silence we the tempest fear.