"A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse."
Silence quotes
Silence
2.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Silence
Browse quotes that often appear alongside silence — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Silence quotes (page 41 of 137)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"People are never quiet. It's go, go, go. I'm a go-getter, but you need rest and silence, just to sit around and think about things."
"There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music."
"Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths."
"In the silence, hear what can't be heard."
"The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious."
"In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence."
"So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?"
"There is an inconvenience which attends all abstruse reasoning. that it may silence, without convincing an antagonist, and requires the same intense study to make us sensible of its force, that was at first requisite for its invention. When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and 'tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attain'd with difficulty."
"When we spend time in silence, we can hear the voice of our soul whispering its sacred message and encouraging us to make choices that bring us more happiness, health, love, meaning, and peace."
"I work late at night. I'm awake and nobody bothers me. It's quiet and things come and talk to me in the silence."
"The mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech."
"There was a terribly ghastly silence. There was a terribly ghastly noise. There was a terribly ghastly silence."
"One's attention has to penetrate the chaotic activity, pass through all the layers of subtle thought, and at last emerge into silence. This is the basic process of transcending."
"I can but die... and I believe in God. Let me try and wait His will in silence."
"When you choose to write using yourself as the source of the story, you are choosing to confront all the silences in which your story has been protectively wrapped. Your job as a writer is to respectfully, determinedly, free the story from the silences and free yourself from both."
"The voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such things as lives in silence themselves."
"Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence."
"I just don't want the fear from the right to be used by the [Barack] Obama administration to silence critics. We have to be willing to tell the truth because we're trying to speak about conditions that are being rendered invisible in our prisons and schools in the hood and so forth and so on."
"As to the mouth, it delights at times in laughter; it is disposed to impart all that the brain conceives; though I daresay it would be silent on much the heart experiences. Mobile and flexible, it was never intended to be compressed in the eternal silence of solitude: it is a mouth which should speak much and smile often, and have human affection for its interlocutor."