Effective Words or Timely Pauses? 151 Silence Quotes
Listen carefully and you will hear it. Silence. It can be the calm within you, the place where you go to find yourself and your thoughts without any disruptions of noise. It can be that perfect communication you have with someone and even more so in strong moments of grief or sorrow. However, in spite of its peace, don’t let it fool you as it has the power to be dangerous and fearful. Don’t let it! Never silence your voice, your ideas or your dreams.
Use it to your advantage! Let the tranquility of silence be your personal silent strength to guide you and make you wiser. Read on to find some of the most incredible quotes and words of wisdom by remarkable personalities that will inspire, stimulate and teach you, friends and loved ones the ways that hearing nothing can change you for the better.
Table of Contents
- Short Silence Quotes
- Inspirational Quotes About Silence
- Poetic Quotes About Silence
- Silence Is Golden, Funny Quotes About Silence
- Insightful Silence Quotes
- Deep Silence Quotes
- Relationship Silence Quotes
- Famous Silence Quotes
- Silence, Justice and Civil Rights
- When Silence Tells a Lie
- Silence Quotes On Images
Short Silence Quotes
- Silence is a source of great strength. Lao Tzu
- Let silence take you to the core of life. Rumi
- My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence. Edith Sitwell
- What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence. Claude Monet
- Be silent or let thy words be worth more than silence. Pythagoras
- Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom. Francis Bacon
- The good and the wise lead quiet lives. Euripides
- Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing. William S. Burroughs
- The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words. William Faulkner, Mosquitoes
- All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone. Blaise Pascal
- Lying is done with words, and also with silence. Adrienne Rich
- In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence. Robert Lynd
- Ιn Silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves. Rumi
- Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute. Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- Saying nothing sometimes says the most. Emily Dickinson
- Silence is a true friend who never betrays. Confucius
- Silence is true wisdom’s best reply. Euripides
- Silence is the wit of fools. Anatole France
- Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone. Alan Watts
- I get tired of talking when I want to be silent. Henry Rollins
- Time and silence are the most luxurious things today. Tom Ford
- For one minute, walk outside, stand there, in silence. Look up at the sky and contemplate how amazing life is. Unknown
- The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence. Marianne Moore
- Silence is the mother of truth. Disraeli
- The best cure for the body is a quiet mind. Napoleon Bonaparte
- There was a brief silence. I think I heard snow falling. Erich Segal
- Speak only if it improves upon the silence. Mahatma Gandhi
- The man I meet is seldom so instructive as the silence which he breaks. Thoreau Henry David
- A fool is known by his speech; and a wise man by silence. Pythagoras
- A sage thing is timely silence, and better than any speech. Plutarch
- You misinterpret everything, even the silence. Franz Kafka, The Castle
- Silence. You must learn that art, it is the only way to survive. Fyodor Dostoevsky
- …silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities. Alan Bradley
- To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence. Louise Bourgeois
- Great souls suffer in silence. Friedrich Schiller
- Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Rumi
- Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me. Rainer Maria Rilke
- Silence, healing. Heraclitus
- I, schooled in misery, know many purifying rites, and I know where speech is proper and where silence. Aeschylus
- Such a deep silence surrounds me, that I think I hear moonbeams striking on the windows. Lucian Blaga
- If we can only speak to slander our betters, let us hold our tongues. Anne Brontë
- The closer you are to the truth, the more silent you become inside. Naval Ravikant
- Without great solitude no serious work is possible. Pablo Picasso
- Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most. Bob Dylan
- When you are silent you are again beautiful. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
- Silence alone is great; all else is weakness. Alfred de Vigny
- Silence is the endless poetry of the universe. Debasish Mridha
- Only he who knows how to speak can be silent. Jean-Paul Sartre
- Silence is safer than speech. Epictetus
- The quiet mind is richer than a crown. Robert Greene
- Confidence is silent. Insecurities are loud. Unknown
- The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak. Baruch Spinoza
- In not only the physical science, but in the real mental silence, the wisdom dawns. Sri S. Satchidananda
- After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. Aldous Huxley
- Silence is also conversation. Ramana Maharshi
Inspirational Quotes About Silence
- The quieter you become the more you are able to hear. Rumi
- Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait ’til the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light. Isaac Newton
- If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet…maybe we could understand something. Federico Fellini
- I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me. Albert Einstein
- Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly. Epictetus
- A fine work of art – music, dance, painting, story – has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place. Robert McKee
- You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. Khalil Gibran, The Prophet - Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, the eternal One. Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The dust of the dead words clings to thee.
Wash thy soul with silence.
Rabindranath Tagore - The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said. Edgar Allan Poe
- Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. Thomas Merton
- Do you want to change the world? Then change yourself first. Do you want to change yourself? Then remain completely silent inside the silence-sea. Sri Chinmoy
- Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods. Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind. Toni Morrison, Love
- We need silence to be able to touch souls. Mother Teresa
- I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. Henry David Thoreau
- If you’re asked: What is the silence? Respond: It is the first stone of the Wisdom’s temple. Pythagoras
- Without silence, there cannot be any real appreciation in life, which is as delicate in its inner fabric as a closed rosebud. Deepak Chopra
- To create inner peace and harmony, meditate like a tree. To bloom like a flower, sing your song with silence and love. Debasish Mridha
- Meditation is not a task to perform but allowing the thinking engine to take rest. In the restfulness of the thinking engine eternity arises. Amit Ray
Related: Best 92 Quotes About Justice (That Will Make You Question What Is Fair)
Poetic Quotes About Silence
- May my silences become more accurate. Theodore Roethke
- When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
Wisława Szymborska - Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.
Pablo Neruda - This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass - I wait
with silent passion
for one gesture
one glance
from you
Rumi - but I am not someone who likes to wound
rather I have a quiet mind
Sappho - Expression of speech .. in what is written or said forget not that silence is also expressive,
That anguish as hot as the hottest and contempt as cold as the coldest may be without words,
That the true adoration is likewise without words and without kneeling.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass - And in the depths of music, I didn’t find the answer,
And again there was silence, and again the ghost
of summer.
Anna Akhmatova - I defend
Not my voice, but my silence
Anna Akhmatova - All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence. Sylvia Plath
Silence Is Golden, Funny Quotes About Silence
- Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact. George Eliot
- God is silent. Now if only man would shut up. Woody Allen
- Never miss a good chance to shut up. Will Rogers
- Silence is golden when you can’t think of a good answer. Muhammad Ali
- The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. Mark Twain
- I don’t think…” then you shouldn’t talk, said the Hatter. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
- You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
- Wise men, when in doubt whether to speak or to keep quiet, give themselves the benefit of the doubt, and remain silent. Napoleon Hill
Insightful Silence Quotes
- We would not say very much in company if we realized how often we misunderstand what others say. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings. Charlotte Brontë
- He said, ‘You don’t have to make conversation with me.’
‘My husband says that I am too silent.’
‘Silence is not a bad thing.’
‘It is when you are unhappy.’
Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case - A book is a friend that will do what no friend does – be silent when we wish to think. Will Durant
- Just imagine the silence in the world, if people talked only what they knew. Karel Čapek
Deep Silence Quotes
- People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. Carl Jung
- Silence is the language of Om. We need silence to be able to reach our Self. Both internal and external silence is very important to feel the presence of that supreme Love. Amit Ray, Om Chanting and Meditation
- I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get. Toni Morrison, God Help the Child
- Silence is pure and holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. Nicholas Sparks
- Meditation is silence, energising and fulfilling. Silent is the eloquent expression of the inexpressible. Sri Chinmoy
- Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
- Silence can often be more disturbing than noise, it reveals the complicated mechanism of our thoughts. Jose Rodrigues Migueis
- Make peace with silence, and remind yourself that it is in this space that you’ll come to remember your spirit. When you’re able to transcend an aversion to silence, you’ll also transcend many other miseries. And it is in this silence that the remembrance of God will be activated. Wayne W. Dyer
- Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing. The same no-thing. They are externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence. Eckhart Tolle
- We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. William Butler Yeats
- I think the first virtue is to restrain the tongue; he approaches nearest to gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right. Cato The Elder
- There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.
And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.
And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.
In the bosom of such as these the spirit dwells in rhythmic silence.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet - Your mind has a flood of questions.
There is but one teacher
Who can answer them.
Who is that teacher?
Your silence-loving heart.
Sri Chinmoy - Silence is difficult and arduous, it is not to be played with. It isn’t something that you can experience by reading a book, or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together, or by retiring into a wood or a monastery. I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence. This silence demands intense psychological work. You have to be burningly aware of your snobbishness, aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt. And when you die to all that, then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence. Jiddu Krishnamurti
Relationship Silence Quotes
- Never be silent with persons you love and distrust,” Mr. Carpenter had said once. “Silence betrays.” L.M. Montgomery, Emily’s Quest
- No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow. Alice Walker
- Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and what barrier is so insurmountable as silence? It has been said also that silence is torture, capable of goading to madness the man who is condemned to it in a prison cell. But what an even greater torture than that of having to keep silence it is to have to endure the silence of the person one loves! Marcel Proust
- A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one, a silence with an attractive one leaves you certain it is you who are impossibly dull. Alain de Botton, Essays In Love
- And let me talk to you with your silence
that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring.
You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations.
Your silence is that of a star, as remote and candid.
Pablo Neruda - They sensed that nothing needed to be said. In silence, minds understand each other. Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges
- Silence is sometimes the best answer. Dalai Lama
Famous Silence Quotes
- He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words. Elbert Hubbard
- Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence. Leonardo da Vinci
- I want only silence, silence and again silence. Let me die quite and forgotten, or if I must live, let me live more quite, and forgotten still… Paul Gauguin
- The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind. Albert Einstein
- In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence. Mother Teresa
- It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart. Mahatma Gandhi
- If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results. Emily Bronte
- Now all my teachers are dead except silence. W. S. Merwin
- I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Soren Kierkegaard
- Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn whatever state I am in, therein to be content. Helen Keller
- Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together. Thomas Carlyle
- The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides. Artur Schnabel
- Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own. George Bernard Shaw
- In Paris, where raillery is so quick to throw emotion out the window, silence, in a roomful of clever people after a story, is the most flattering of all marks of success. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly
- People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little. It is plain than an ignorant person thinks everything he does know important, and he tells it to everybody. But a well-educated man is not so ready to display his learning; he would have too much to say, and he sees that there is much more to be said, so he holds his peace. Jean Jacques Rousseau
- He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure. Henry James, The American
Silence, Justice and Civil Rights
- Your very silence shows you agree. Euripides
- Silence isn’t neutrality; it is supporting the status-quo. Yuval Noah Harari
- To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. Abraham Lincoln
- Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. Martin Luther King Jr
- Insanity triumphed because sane people were silent. Randy Shilts
- All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. Thomas Jefferson
- Your silence will not protect you. Audre Lorde
- I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope
- The truth hurts, but silence kills. Mark Twain
- Because it won’t change if we don’t say something. Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
- Silence is argument carried out by other means. Ernesto Che Guevara
- Silence is sometimes an argument of Consent. Thomas Hobbes
- All I insist on, and nothing else, is that you should show the whole world that you are not afraid. Be silent, if you choose; but when it is necessary, speak—and speak in such a way that people will remember it. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- There can be no cancellation of accomplished facts; but for practical purposes a conspiracy of silence is almost as effective as cancellation. Unmentioned, what is can become as though it were not. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point
- We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid. Audre Lorde
When Silence Tells a Lie
- When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie. Yevgeny Yevtushenko
- It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie. Victor Hugo
- The cruelest lies are often told in silence. Robert Louis Stevenson
- Sometimes, to remain silent is to lie, since silence can be interpreted as assent. Miguel de Unamuno
- Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence. Henri Frederic Amiel
Silence Quotes On Images
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