Quotes About Reticence

#1. There's a reticence necessary when you consider the suffering of others. Into the space created by that reticence, you bring in those things that best help us confront ambiguity: music, painting, film, and so on.

Teju Cole

#2. If a man didn't make sense, the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation, for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#3. As anyone who has covered the company for any length of time knows, Yahoo's record on major decision-making has been akin to a hippie commune - a lot of wrangling internally in a culture where everyone seems to have a voice and a reticence to push the button to launch.

Kara Swisher

#4. Looking back, it made no sense for my college friends and me to distance ourselves from the hard-won achievements of earlier feminists. We should have cheered their efforts. Instead, we lowered our voices, thinking the battle was over, and with this reticence we hurt ourselves.

Sheryl Sandberg

#5. It has a way of eroding barriers-that famous Yankee reticence-which would otherwise be impregnable.

Stephen King

#6. Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it.

M.R. James

#7. In our modern religion there is a reticence in speaking of our personal relationship to Jesus which often causes great loss. We forget that the majority of men are guided more by emotions than by intellect: the heart is the great power by which they are meant to be influenced and molded.

Andrew Murray

#8. I finally shook myself out of my reticence.
He was just a boy. He was harmless. He had a girlfriend who was gorgeous and sociable. I would calibrate my smiles and interactions to friendship or acquaintance level. No big deal.

Penny Reid

#9. In the liquid amber within the ivory porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.

Okakura Kakuzo

#10. Cautious reticence is, in nine cases out of ten, cowardly betrayal. The best policy is never to be politic, but to proclaim every atom of the truth so far as God has taught it to you.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#11. She was a dark, unenduring little flower - yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#12. In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely ... Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius ...

Okakura Kakuzo

#13. Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.

Bernard Bailyn

#14. There's that initial reticence for some athletes to take you seriously.

Lisa Guerrero

#15. When virtue had been declared a crime, there was no refuge even in reticence.

Clive James

#16. The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge ... falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.

Agnes Repplier

#17. There is no reticence nor any limit to a 'Majique.' Only the unwillingness of the mind to open itself to the limitless power of possibilities that exist within the unbelievable.

Rob Shepherd

#18. Pardon all runners,
All speechless, alien winds,
All mad waters.
Pardon their impulses,
Their wild attitudes,
Their young flights, their reticence.
When a message has no clothes on
How can it be spoken.

Thomas Merton

#19. Where there is lack of faith, There is a lack of respect. Employ reticence, and care with words. When the work is done and the task complete The people will say: 'It just happened.

Lao-Tzu

#20. He sensed that his own reticence would make it easier to restrain others.

David Halberstam

#21. It is not a life at all. It is a reticence, in three volumes.

William E. Gladstone

#22. He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence - of talking without meaning - is never effaced.

Henry Adams

#23. A sound marriage is not based on complete frankness; it is based on a sensible reticence.

Morris L. Ernst

#24. He loved Noah's combination of reticence and curiosity. His too-formal language hid a major sexy beast waiting to be let out to play. And Adrian was just the guy to uncage it.

Annabeth Albert

#25. The name Shatner is Austrian and partly Germanic, and there's Germanic reticence and silence perhaps, but there is passion underneath.

William Shatner

#26. After Sept. 11, there was a reticence and worrying about films that touched on war, and even more on terrorism.

Gillian Armstrong

#27. Every virtue can come with its own accompanying vice. The virtue of reticence can yield the vice of aloofness.

David Brooks

#28. Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.

Hannah Arendt

#29. A judicious reticence is hard to learn, but it is one of the great lessons of life.

Lord Chesterfield

#30. When it comes to letting the world in on the secrets of his heart, he has about as much shrinking reticence as a steam calliope.

P.G. Wodehouse

#31. There is a probably natural and learned reticence with myself talking about my early life.

Pamela Stephenson

#32. You yourself are English and yet you do not seem to appreciate the quality of the English reaction to a direct question. It is invariably one of suspicion and the natural result is reticence.

Agatha Christie

#33. Reticence was clearly a national characteristic, even if the other person spoke French.

Sara Sheridan

#34. The right to reticence seems earned only by having nothing to hide.

Jill Johnston

#35. There is a nice Victorian reticence in denying the probability of a miserable prelude to mortality, and it is what everyone wants to hear. But if peace and dignity are what we delude ourselves to expect, most of us will die wondering what we, our our doctos, have done wrong.

Sherwin B. Nuland

#36. These Americans, under their forthcoming manner, their surface-gush, as some might call it, have an odd reticence about what goes on underneath.

Edith Wharton

#37. Racing is a great mania to which one must sacrifice everything, without reticence, without hesitation.

Enzo Ferrari

#38. Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

John Ashbery

#39. One must be as clear as one's natural reticence allows one to be.

Marianne Moore

#40. I said nothing - I hadn't known Marya, and anyway, "listening quietly" was my general social strategy

John Green

#41. Never complain, never explain. Resist the temptation to defend yourself or make excuses.

Brian Tracy

#42. The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty.

Oscar Wilde

#43. I don't think ... then you shouldn't talk, said the Hatter.

Lewis Carroll

#44. There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.
(The Mill)

Anton Chekhov

#45. If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

Mark Twain

#46. The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

Mark Twain

#47. You know you're about as forthcoming as a mime.

Shirley Jump

#48. You should try not to talk so much, friend. You'll sound far less stupid that way.
- Breeze

Brandon Sanderson

#49. It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.

Honore De Balzac

#50. Silence does not always mark wisdom.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#51. There should be a little gap between you and your friends, though you'll miss their companionship and you'll also miss their disrespect.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#52. Reticences are as revealing as avowals.

Elizabeth Bibesco

#53. Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

William S. Burroughs

#54. I remember manners, that's when people are scared to make other persons mad.

Emma Donoghue

#55. Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

Orson Scott Card

#56. Many times in life I've regretted the things I've said without thinking. But I've never regretted the things I said nearly as much as the words I left unspoken.

Lisa Kleypas

#57. I do not want to talk about it.

Don DeLillo