Top 100 Not Silence Quotes
#1. Everything has two endings-
a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.
Before a life, air.
And after.
As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
Jane Hirshfield
#2. You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not - silence is the sharper sword.
Samuel Johnson
#3. My self-wroth is not linked to your cruel words and actions.
My self-esteem is not affected by your deliberate attempts to destroy my character.
You have no power over me.
You will not silence me.
Marina Cohen
#4. Alif found himself succumbing to the silence of the place, a quiet so open and broad that it seemed almost to roar, as though it was not silence at all but music in some ancient inaudible key. His eyes drifted shut and he slept without dreaming.
G. Willow Wilson
#5. Silence is a learned practice that requires far more than just not talking. Not talking is not silence; it's just not talking.
Caroline Myss
#6. Life is one kind of sound. Death is another kind of sound. Those who cannot hear the sound of death think death is silence. Death is not silence, it is just another kind of sound, but may not within the hearing range of a normal ear.
Jaggi Vasudev
#7. GIFT
You tell me that silence
is nearer to peace than poems
but if for my gift
I brought you silence
(for I know silence)
you would say
This is not silence
this is another poem
and you would hand it back to me
Leonard Cohen
#8. There was a momentary lull in the shooting and spellslinging, and the kid started scrambling to his feet. I grabbed his arm and pulled him back down. In my family that's not silence; it's reloading.
Lisa Shearin
#9. When the world stilled again, ominous silence reigned. Scratch that, not silence exactly. The van's radiator hissed, and someone was groaning. Oh, right. That was me.
Jaye Wells
#10. If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest God, does not bless our work.
Thomas Merton
#12. Think not silence the wisdom of fools; but, if rightly timed, the honor of wise men, who have not the infirmity, but the virtue of taciturnity.
Thomas Browne
#13. Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.
Samuel Butler
#14. Just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#16. Laws of silence don't work ... . When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out.
Tennessee Williams
#17. I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.
Abraham Lincoln
#18. Mr Rycroft said nothing. It was so difficult not to say the wrong thing to Captain Wyatt that it was usually safer not to reply at all.
Agatha Christie
#19. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Lawrence Durrell
#20. Silence - Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
Benjamin Franklin
#21. And suddenly, not a soul's at the store as for other & similar & just as blank reasons, they've gone to the silence, the suppers of their own mystery.
Jack Kerouac
#22. Discipline must come through liberty ... We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.
Maria Montessori
#24. You say, "But He has not answered." He has, He is so near to you that His silence is the answer. His silence is big with terrific meaning that you cannot understand yet, but presently you will.
Oswald Chambers
#25. Silence, this will surprise you not, isn't really a Jewish concept.
Simon Schama
#26. Living in a house where domestic violence goes on every day never feels like home. You don't have to suffer in silence. I'm giving my full support to this website as it will give proper and practical advice about what to do if you feel afraid. Remember, you're not alone.
Beverley Knight
#27. Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self.
Anthony De Mello
#28. There was a part of him (her) that dreamed, and he (she) was not sure if that part could ever retreat into an interminable silence.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#29. The world is full of noise. Might we not set ourselves to learn silence, stillness solitude?
Elisabeth Elliot
#30. Not appreciating the noise until she was surrounded by silence.
Lisa Wingate
#31. The wall of silence that had instantaneously sprung between us was strong, deafening. I could not concentrate, having a sudden surge of emotions about all relationships being mawkish and pointless.
Kavipriya Moorthy
#32. Fame has no necessary conjunction with praise; it may exist without the breath of a word: it is a recognition of excellence which must be felt, but need not be spoken. Even the envious must feel it,
feel it, and hate in silence.
Washington Allston
#33. People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#34. I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
George Eliot
#35. It was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words.
Ayn Rand
#36. Today, love came knocking at my window. To share with dad such a confusing, yet wonderful occasion would be great. Still, I keep this to myself. Who knows? In the future maybe dad and I can share more than silence but not until dad allows love to knock for me at the front door.
Anthony Paull
#37. It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#38. Sit in meditation ! But do not think ! Look only at your mind ! You will see thoughts coming into it ! Before they can enter, throw these away from your mind till your mind is capable of entire silence.
Sri Aurobindo
#39. There is a silence that comes to a house when no one can sleep. I guess it's the price of love; I know it's not cheap.
U2
#40. It's very important in life to know when to shut up. You should not be afraid of silence.
Alex Trebek
#41. I wish not to tell you how I feel,
I choose silence so that you leave,
Kiss me goodbye and set me free...
Sanhita Baruah
#42. I always begin my prayer in silence, for it is in the silence of the heart that God speaks. God is the friend of silence-we need to listen to God because it's not what we say but what He says to us and through us that matters.
Mother Teresa
#43. For us, silence is all we have ever known. I do not speak because I do not know what to say. He does not speak because he has no interest in talking.
Alessandra Torre
#44. Let's try not to be exacting with other people, but rather to pass over in silence those thousand little annoyances that tend to irritate us. For we know that no one is perfect in this life, and we must put up with the defects of others as they put up with ours.
Rose Philippine Duchesne
#45. Music is pleasant not only because of the sound of many voices,
but because of the silence that is in it.
Karen Russell
#46. A gentleman ... sleeps at his work. That's what work's for. Why do you think they have the SILENCE notices in the library? So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.
Alan Ayckbourn
#47. You've got to trust the ground you're standing on and the work you've done in telling your story. The goal should be to bring those thousands of people - viewers - together and make them one. When you feel that happening, it's usually in silence, not applause or laughter.
Kevin Spacey
#48. Going across the Tannai Desert was one of the spookiest experiences I've ever had. Not driving during the day; that was fine. And so we camped in an old sort of truck siding, I think. And the silence. The eerie silence and then a dingo howling, and it was just so spooky. I didn't sleep all night.
Joan Kirner
#49. But we do not fear silence, for often God speaks loudest in the quiet of our hearts. And
Diana Gabaldon
#50. It's going to go away because we all need silence. We all need time to reflect and think. I am not at all pessimistic about this.
Isabel Allende
#51. Dizzy Gillespie, the jazz trumpet player, once said, "It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play." He was one of my special ones. And he was quite correct. Silence enhances music. What you do not play can sweeten what you do. But
Mitch Albom
#52. When my heart yearn for silence in a crowd full of cheerful people, thats not the lonliness i seek but want to feel the rustling of my abandoned desires pouring upon the broken hearts. All the noise i want to here now is the symphony of love and of healing.
Annie Ali
#53. Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling.
Alice Munro
#55. A look which reveals inward stress adds more beauty to the face, no matter how much tragedy and pain it bespeaks; but the face which, in silence, does not announce hidden mysteries is not beautiful, regardless of the symmetry of its features.
Khalil Gibran
#56. 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
#57. We drive in silence until I need an answer, "What did he say to you at the elevator?" I look straight ahead when I ask.
"He thanked me for being there for you, even as a boy, when he could not protect you himself. He told me that I had his permission to love you.
Tara Brown
#58. There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not as a secret, but as a prayer.
Terry Tempest Williams
#59. I never feared the night, not even as a child, but Blackcliff's night is different, heavy with a silence that makes you look over your shoulder, a silence that feels like a living thing.
Sabaa Tahir
#60. If you are a great dramatic actor then you often don't know if people are enjoying your stuff at all because they are sitting there in silence. But with comedy it's a simple premise. If it's funny, people laugh. If it's not, they don't.
Steve Coogan
#61. Silence ... leads us to make a gift of self rather than a selfishness that has been gift-wrapped ... Silence does not mean running away but rather recollecting ourselves in the open space of God.
Madeleine Delbrel
#62. The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen.
Pattiann Rogers
#63. Our toil must be in silence, and our efforts all in secret; for this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength.
Bram Stoker
#64. I would swear that I could practically hear crickets in the ensuing silence, if not for the fact that the stale air probably kills anything that requires oxygen to breathe.
T.T. Escurel
#65. There's nothing more powerful than a woman who knows how to contain her power and not let it leak, standing firmly within it in mystery and silence. A woman who talks too much sheds her allure.
Marianne Williamson
#66. But why will God not speak to me? ... I think when God is silent, He wants us to prove in our hearts that we are willing to follow Him no matter the cost. If all answers were crystal-clear, how could we show our devotion to Him?
Jennifer Beckstrand
#67. Though he had spoken of the subject many times, in the silence of his room he added the powerful kind of phrasing that would not have occurred to him as he spoke, because it's origins were in the collaboration of hand and pen.
Mark Helprin
#68. Many women do not want to venture out into the 'opinion world' until they are certain of themselves, the facts, and that they are right. They are afraid of being shot down. The result is often silence.
Madeleine M. Kunin
#69. They walked as old friends walk, without often speaking, sharing the kind of silence that is not so much silence as a kind of still communication.
Susan Cooper
#70. The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.
Dale Spender
#72. He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.
Elbert Hubbard
#73. Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality; silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence.
Samantha Power
#74. I truly believe that at times like this, silence is not golden. It is yellow.
Zell Miller
#75. Getting to this point hasn't always been easy; it took me years to really learn to silence my mind. But as you move through your career and your life, you will have to learn that if you're not what you do, then what you do has no business keeping you entertained at night.
Kelly Cutrone
#76. I teach you both effort and effortlessness, because unless you attain to effortless-effort, unless you attain to active passivity, unless you attain to a singing-silence - they look paradoxical - unless you attain to an unmoving dance, you have not attained.
Rajneesh
#77. For he who has once had to listen will listen always, whether he knows he will never hear anything again, or whether he does not. In other words, they like other words, no doubt about it, silence once broken will never again be whole.
Samuel Beckett
#78. There is the silence of age, too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it in words intelligible to those who have not lived the great range of life.
Edgar Lee Masters
#79. Can you hear the silence? It's the good kind of silence, not the silence that listens back.
Patricia Briggs
#80. Be my sonata, my cantata, my love
sing me something sweet
but not too sweet
(or i may grow deaf to our harmony
as we decrescendo into silence)
Nenia Campbell
#81. There are always some areas world history does not reach, zones of silence and undisturbed ignorance.
Fernand Braudel
#83. Tread softly as you draw near to the bedside of a dying man, for the space around him is holy ground. Speak in hushed tones, with awe and reverence, as you would in a cathedral. Let not the mind engage in trivial thoughts. The awesome majesty of Death can only be met in silence.
Jennifer Worth
#84. So many of his problems were of a kind that other people did not understand, that he got used to working them out for himself, in silence.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#85. An Act of Dissent is simply a way of saying, 'No, I do not accept this and, as my silence may be construed as acquiescence, I would like to make a small gesture to indicate that you can all go fuck yourselves.
Mark Thomas
#86. Sometimes the most appropriate response to an attack is to not engage, especially in situations where your own words may be used as weapons against you.
Amy Neftzger
#87. Interspirituality is the world music of religion; borrowing, fusing, blending and bouncing rhythms and riffs off one another not to create a homogenized spirituality, but to birth a radical new sound embedded in the ancient and timeless silence. This doesn't impact or deepen my life-it is my life.
Rami M. Shapiro
#88. It is not in the storm or in the strife
We feel benumbed and wish to be nor more,
But in the after-silence on the shore
When all is lost except a little life.
George Gordon Byron
#89. 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
#90. SILENCE does not always mean 'NEUTRALITY'! Sometimes, it may mean 'consenting' to a wrong, sometimes it may mean 'condoning' a mistake and sometimes it may mean giving space to the wrong doer....SOMETIMES, we need to get up and FIGHT!
Abha Maryada Banerjee
#91. I had dedicated my life to words. But sometimes, words are not needed.
Jordan L. Hawk
#92. Only when the mind is tranquil-through self-knowledge and not through imposed self-discipline-only then, in that tranquillity, in that silence, can reality come into being. It is only then that there can be bliss, that there can be creative action.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#93. As with most great communicators, God knows that the point of silence and the pause between sentences is not to give the audience the chance to fill the silence with empty babbling but to help create more depth to the conversation.
Renita J. Weems
#94. As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.
Albert Camus
#95. We do not yet know each other because we have not yet dared to be silent together.
Georgette Leblanc
#96. Like a poem that's aware
of the silence of things
you speak so as not to see me
Alejandra Pizarnik
#97. Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.
Sylvia Plath
#98. Silence.
Then the night echoed with Beckett's anguished wail. NOT MY BROTHERS!
Debra Anastasia
#99. Silence is the only answer you should give to the fools. Where ignorance speaks, intelligence should not give advices.
Benito Mussolini
#100. Death and his scythe do not come. No sweeping black capes or ethereal escapes. There's no pearly gate, no prisms of colors as his soul slips away. The stillness is cold steel. The silence is empty with no memory to mend it.
Laura Kreitzer
