Articles and Features

Silence

Week of June 28, 1998

Quote compilation by Laura S. Moncur, Staff Writer.

"Silence is more musical than any song."
Christina Rossetti
"There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub."
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
Aldous Huxley
"True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment."
William Penn
"Silence is a text easy to misread."
A. A. Attanasio, "The Eagle and the Sword"
"Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech."
Martin Fraquhar Tupper
"I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers."
Kahlil Gibran
"Oppression can only survive through silence."
Carmen de Monteflores
"The cruelest lies are often told in silence."
Robert Louis Stevenson
"Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time."
Thomas Carlyle
"In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in an clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth."
Mahatma Gandhi
"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."
John, Lord Morley
"He had occasional flashes of silence, that made his conversation perfectly delightful."
Sydney Smith, referring to Macaulay
"Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence."
Robert Fripp
"Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant."
Saadi
"Silence is one of the great arts of conversation, as allowed by Cicero himself, who says, 'there is not only an art, but an eloquence in it.' A well bred woman may easily and effectually promote the most useful and elegant conversation without speaking a word. The modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence."
Tom Blair
"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 unspoken word never does harm."
Kossuth
"It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few."
Pythagoras
"My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence."
Edith Sitwell
"Not merely an absence of noise, Real Silence begins when a reasonable being withdraws from the noise in order to find peace and order in his inner sanctuary."
Peter Minard
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