Top 100 By Silence Quotes
#1. Avoid the base hypocrisy of condemning in one man what you pass over in silence when committed by another.
Theodore Roosevelt
#2. Of silence, I can say only what I have heard, that all things are known by that which they make or leave
and so speech isn't itself, but its effect, and silence is the same.
Jesse Ball
#3. We try to abolish intervals by our manic insistence on keeping busy, on doing something. And as a result, all we succeed in doing is destroying all hope of tranquility ... You have to learn to immerse yourself in the silences between.
Lyall Watson
#4. Emptiness is only a disguise for an intimacy of God's, that God's silence, the eerie stillness, is filled by the Word without words, by Him who is above all names, by Him who is all in all. And his silence is telling us that He is here.
Karl Rahner
#5. Some comics have long routines to get them in the mood - I just prefer to sit down, write out the same jokes in a different order and then have a little prayer that I won't be met by silence.
Jack Whitehall
#6. I've been ignored by prettier women than you,
but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence
so far, without spilling a drop.
Jeffrey McDaniel
#7. Neither could speak. It was the day that a silence settled on the pair of them, and they were bound close by it. Will felt, in that moment, too small to face such misery, but she knew that she would have to expand now, with a terrible rush, to fill the empty space.
Katherine Rundell
#8. The silence of a place where there were once horses
is a mountain
and I have seen by lightning that ever mountain
once fell from the air
ringing
like the chime of an iron shoe ...
W.S. Merwin
#9. I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence. By
Ursula K. Le Guin
#10. Music is the space between the notes as much as the notes themselves; it's defined as much by silence as by sound.
James McKean
#11. My first college roommate greeted me with a shocked silence followed by, 'So ... you're black.'
Al Roker
#12. Not appreciating the noise until she was surrounded by silence.
Lisa Wingate
#13. You can't improve sound by having only silence. The problem is to use each at the proper time.
Norton Juster
#14. The silence of those in positions of influence in the church who know, or have a strong suspicion, that being gay is a nonpathological minority variant in the human condition drives me crazy, far crazier than I am driven by any loud-mouthed purveyor of hateful nonsense.
James Alison
#15. When one remains without thinking one understands another by means of the universal language of Silence.
Ramana Maharshi
#16. It was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words.
Ayn Rand
#17. I called my wife up on the cell phone and said baby you aint gonna believe this, i go, we just hit a deer with the airplane. and there was a silence on the other end of the line followed by.. OH MY GOD.! were you on the ground? I said nope, santa was makin one last run..
Bill Engvall
#18. I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force.
Lech Walesa
#19. My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.
Edward W. Said
#20. The breath of song in your remembering eyes cascades fragile reflections of time-steeped sunsets tinting delicate snowflakes with the solitude of a sleeping forest where ancient secrets lie waiting, undisturbed by knowing, tranquil in the forgetfulness of yesterday's silvery silence
Sean Terrence Best
#21. The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.
William James
#23. Every hour of your life that ticks by, there are numerous points and moments when you can choose to pause - and be aware of your mental and physical state. At any given point, you can freeze the flow that is your life, and be fully conscious for a moment.
Kevin Michel
#24. ... if you can't be happy then be quiet!" frm "Silent Joe," by T Jefferson Parker." Silence is another form of lying." frm "Attachment," by me. Take your pick ... words, "writing freezes speech," Chris Hedges. "Writing is thinking," me.
Mark Jabbour
#25. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.
Ambrose Bierce
#26. I talked for hours, and people listened because they hated the silence too. They were happy to create it, and then terrified by what they made. And so I came to understand the split at the root of the soul of all men.
Aliya Whiteley
#27. Profound silence would brood over the valley, even weighing down our spirits with indefinable heaviness. There can be no other place in the world where man feels himself so alone, so isolated, so completely ignored by nature, so incapable of entering into communion with her
David Oliver Relin
#28. It was long after midnight and the stars looked damp and chilly; the air was full of the busy silence of the night, which is created by hundreds of small furry things treading very carefully in the hope of finding dinner while avoiding being the main course.
Terry Pratchett
#29. A lot of writers ... sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that's all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere
even in prison.
Louis Auchincloss
#30. Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
Jane Hirshfield
#31. The catacombs where ghostly bodies lie. In the silence you hear the screams go by.
Jackie Mae
#32. By letting go of what is known, you are free to encounter the living present, in all its perplexity and revelation. Just as silence is the possibility of sound, self-confessed ignorance is the possibility of encounter.
Philip Shepherd
#34. They were shadows in the dark, cocooned in its secrets, bathed in its silence, enspelled by each other.
J.D. Robb
#35. There will be no silence from Canada. Our friendship has no limit. Generation after generation we have traveled many difficult miles together side by side.
Jean Chretien
#36. There was a long silence, finally broken by Teff'ith. Jedi Grand Master mom, Supreme Commander dad. Now we get why Theron's so messed up. So you sending a fleet, or what?
Drew Karpyshyn
#37. There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.
Tadeusz Borowski
#38. We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground. We are undermined by faith and love.
Henry David Thoreau
#39. Hello Rush," she said, breaking the silence. The sound of her voice almost sent me to my knees. God, I'd missed her voice.
"Blaire," I managed to say, terrified that I'd scare her away just by speaking.
Abbi Glines
#40. After another long silence, bit by bit, realisation dawned upon Edmund and he became even paler than Hecate herself which was, in itself, a fantastic achievement. Adele Rose, Awakening.
Adele Rose
#41. Passion is overcome only by him who has won through stillness of spirit the perfect vision; it comes through the contentment that is regardless of the world.
Shantideva
#42. The language of the universe comes not from the voice but from the primordial silence. You can understand it by enhancing your feelings.
Debasish Mridha
#43. What do I have to do to convince you that I'm only using Dabria for one reason, one only reason: Destroy Hank, bit by bit if is necessary,and make him pay for all the things he has done to harm the girl I love?
Becca Fitzpatrick
#45. The silence of the room was disturbed by a book that flew open with fluttering leaves,
Dorothy Scarborough
#46. Once I Was A Little Girl
And I Will End Up As An Old Old Lady,
Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
Petra Hermans
#47. Its purpose is self-renewal, and this is accomplished by spending time alone, immersed in the beautiful blanket of silence.
Robin S. Sharma
#48. After an argument, silence may mean acceptance or the continuation of resistance by other means.
Mason Cooley
#49. Rage and revenge sat in his heart fanned by time and silence. Before he could realise anything, he was engulfed in flames. Everything he touched, lost its existence in his life. Turning him into a monster, who destroys everything in a daylight but cries in dark and silence.
Akshay Vasu
#50. Death by drowning, death by snakebite ... death by memory loss, death by claymore ... death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game ... death by authority, death by isolation, death by genocide, death by Kennedy ... death by signature, death by silence ... death by performance
Colum McCann
#51. There was a long silence. Magnus broke it. "I have to hand it to you," he said. "I never thought Jace and Clary would be topped by anyone else in terms of insane, self-destructive decisions, but you all are giving them a run for their money.
Cassandra Clare
#52. It is better to remain silent than to speak the truth ill-humoredly, and spoil an excellent dish by covering it with bad sauce.
Saint Francis De Sales
#53. Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.
Sylvia Plath
#54. Fortune favors the brave."
Another moment of silence. And then, Iolanthe found herself shouting at the top of her lungs, her voice nearly drowned by the bellow of all the rebels present, "And the brave make their own fortune!
Sherry Thomas
#55. It's surprisingly nice out here, peaceful and pretty-strange to be standing in the middle of a little garden while enclosed by the massive stone walls of the prison, like being at the exact center of a hurricane, and finding peace and silence in the middle of so much shrieking damage.
Lauren Oliver
#56. Making love requires no thought. You move as the fronds of a palm tree move in the breeze. It is all instinct. All wonder. When you love someone, your lips are incomplete until they are oiled by a kiss. You can say 'I love you' a thousand ways but you can say it better with silence and a kiss.
Chloe Thurlow
#57. Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.
Irvine Welsh
#58. In the silence of the night, streetlights talk each other by touching their lights each other!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#59. when I see a growing hatred for any race of human being, no matter the justification, I cannot stand by in silence.
Kristy Cambron
#60. One disagreeable result of whispering is that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence, haunted by the ghosts of sound - strange cracks and tickings, the rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow.
Charles Dickens
#61. A smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence.
Edith Wharton
#62. The monotonous mechanical drone is swallowed up in the silence of the room, like a vivid dream ripped out by the hand of nothingness.
Haruki Murakami
#63. By this time he had discovered that his neighbour was not very conversible; But whether her silence proceeded from pride, discretion, timidity, or idiotism, he was still unable to decide.
Matthew Gregory Lewis
#64. I wish I could wrap up the glitter star-green of this moment and hand it to you like an angel gift. Give you the heat lightning flying in jagged silence over the distant mountains. And the smell of September prairie grass and the even fainter scent of October pine now descending ...
Carew Papritz
#65. A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.
Aminatta Forna
#66. Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.
Italo Calvino
#67. I had absolute freedom to create things on my own and in silence. No rush, the artificial rush by media. Certainly no rush to grow up. We had plenty of boyhood, plenty of girlhood.
Barry Hannah
#68. People reveal as much by their silence as they do by what they say.
Sandra Brown
#69. Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be. It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every song, every word.
Eckhart Tolle
#70. Quiet descended, a silence so consuming that even the drafty corridors ceased whistling. Bog wasn't certain where to look, so he solved the problem by plucking out his eyes and sticking them in a drawer.
A. Lee Martinez
#71. Webster lapsed into silence. Started thinking hard. He was a smart enough bureaucrat to know if you can't beat them, you join them. You force yourself to think like they think.
Lee Child
#72. My thoughts are quiet, but not calm. There is a terror on the edge of the silence, a terror fed by my burning flesh and the stench of death.
Christine Fonseca
#73. Oft in the silence of the night,
When the lonely moon rides high,
When wintry winds are whistling,
And we hear the owl's shrill cry,
In the quiet, dusky chamber,
By the flickering firelight,
Rising up between two sleepers,
Comes a spirit all in white.
Louisa May Alcott
#74. There is silence and then the familiar smack of Beatrice Muriel's palm against her forehead. "A love marriage," she says. In her opinion, love marriages border on the indecent. They signify a breakdown of propriety, a giving in to the base instincts exhibited by the lower castes and foreigners.
Nayomi Munaweera
#75. All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows ...
Wendell Berry
#76. History is written by the victors, the strongest, the most determined. Truth is found most often in the silence, in the quiet places.
Kate Mosse
#77. The food doesn't matter. No, up here, in the room. It's so wonderful to shut out the world for a few hours. Rest, peace, silence, solitude. You would think they were luxuries that only the very rich can afford, and yet they cost nothing. Strange that they should be so hard to come by.
W. Somerset Maugham
#78. We all arrive by different streets, by unequal languages, at Silence.
Pablo Neruda
#79. What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.
Audre Lorde
#80. The silence deepened, like a fall of snow, accumulating second by second, flake by flake, each flake by itself inconsiderable, until everything is transformed.
Pat Barker
#81. He has depths of silence - which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it's always something he has seen or felt for himself - never a bit banal. That would be what one might have feared and what would kill me. But never. She
Henry James
#82. Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both.
James Joyce
#83. Listen to the night wind in the trees, Listen to the summer grass singing; Listen to the time that's tripping by, And the dawn dew falling. Listen to the moon as it climbs the sky, Listen to the pebbles humming; Listen to the mist in the trembling leaves, And the silence calling.
Ruskin Bond
#84. Silence is consent. And silence where life and liberty is at stake, where by a timely protest we could stay the destoyer's hand, and do not do so, is as criminal as giving actual aid to the oppressor, for it answers his purpose ...
Ernestine Rose
#85. Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist. About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country. It's one of the main causes of death for pregnant women in the United States. At
Rebecca Solnit
#86. As I age I am grateful to find that a silence has begun to gather in me, coexisting with my tempers and my fears, unchanged by my joys or my pain. Sanctuary. Connected to the Silence everywhere.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#87. The rest of them moved toward the fence, in complete silence. Each of the teenagers jumped swiftly onto the iron spikes. With a blurry speed, they climbed up onto the sharp finials, and leaped down to the other side
A.O. Peart
#88. I'll never use force to try to make my enemies think the way I think, George - partly because I don't believe in it, and partly because it's useless. You can't destroy ideas by force, and you can't hide 'em by silence.
Kenneth Roberts
#89. In space there are no seasons, and this is as true of the ships that cross the distances between humanity's far-flung homes. But we measure our seasons anyway: by a smile, a silence, a song.
Yoon Ha Lee
#90. The Holy Spirit does not speak to a soul that is distracted and garrulous. He speaks by His quiet inspirations to a soul that is recollected, to a soul that knows how to keep silence.
Maria Faustina Kowalska
#91. By and large over time, pain turns into grief, grief turns into silence, and silence turns into lonesomeness, as vast and bottomless as the dark oceans
Elif Shafak
#92. For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it.
Martin Buber
#93. What happens when you narrow your definition to what is convenient, or what is fashionable, or what is expected, is dishonesty by silence.
Audre Lorde
#94. It is true when you are by yourself and you think about life, it is always sad. All that excitement and so on has a way of suddenly leaving you, and it's as though, in the silence, somebody called your name, and you heard your name for the first time.
Katherine Mansfield
#96. Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
Wendell Berry
#97. I would much rather sit, dimmed by inattention, and study the atmosphere and the silence and dance between people, but often times I'm not offered this privilege. The necessity for isolation, and the striving for attention is the only contradiction I find in being a writer and an actress.
Masiela Lusha
#98. By silence, I hear other men's imperfections and conceal my own.
Zeno Of Elea
#99. Maybe faith was never meant to be some perfectly plotted, passion-driven paperback. Maybe faith is the long story of a happy marriage -- an average life made fuller, not smaller, by the pockets of silence and darkness that break into it.
Addie Zierman
#100. Only those afraid of the truth seek to silence debate, intimidate those with whom they disagree, or slander their ideological counterparts. Those who know they are right have no reason to stifle debate because they realize that all opposing arguments will ultimately be overcome by fact.
Glenn Beck
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