Quotes About Silence

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

“I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Silence is so freaking loud”
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

“Never miss a good chance to shut up.”
― Will Rogers

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“God is silent. Now if only man would shut up.”
― Woody Allen

“I don't think..." then you shouldn't talk, said the Hatter.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.”
― Edith Sitwell

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
― Ansel Adams

“Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.”
― Yevgeny Yevtushenko

“Silence is a source of Great Strength.”
― Lao Tzu

“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, Marginalia

“Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.”
― Karen Marie Moning

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs

“Sometimes I ask myself, "Do I have the courage to do the right thing when it matters most?" And that answer, I'm afraid, is silence.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“I have never heard a more eloquent silence.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“You gotta be careful: don't say a word to nobody about nothing anytime ever.”
― Johnny Depp

“Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“In Silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves.”
― Rumi

“Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such

“Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.”
― Jodi Picoult