45 Quotes On The Power Of Silence

In our fast-paced, constantly connected world, silence often stands as a powerful counterbalance, offering profound moments of reflection and clarity. Embracing silence can lead to greater self-awareness, mental tranquility, and a deeper understanding of our surroundings. We've gathered a collection of 45 inspiring quotes that celebrate the transformative power of silence, each one offering a unique perspective on this underrated yet vital aspect of life. Whether you seek peace, introspection, or simply a momentary pause from the noise, these quotes are sure to resonate and inspire contemplation. Join us as we delve into the wisdom wrapped in silence, where words are minimal but the impact is significant.

1. “Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.” - Margaret Atwood

2. “Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.” - Jean Arp

3. “most people are perfectly afraid of silence” - E.E. Cummings

4. “We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.” - Leonora Carrington

5. “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

6. “But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.” - Thomas Merton

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

8. “I did the only thing I knew how to do: I built my own walls of silence to disguise my desperation and what later came to be recognized and diagnosed as depression.” - Sharon E. Rainey

9. “Silence is golden but too long a silence an imitation junk” - Dr. Amit Abraham

10. “It was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become in one’s self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy world.” - Sarah Orne Jewett

11. “... isn't breaking a supervillian out of jail a little ... much?” - Kirstin van Dyke

12. “Tristan started the car, pulling carefully out onto the street now that the snow had begun to fall."You seemed so happy this last quarter," P.K. prompted."I was. I fell in love.""And?""It didn't work out--isn't working out." Tristan shook his head. "I'm not ready.""Ah," said P.K. They drove the rest of the way in silence. Tristan thought then that he was lucky; Jonathon and Daniel didn't know how to value a silence, but P.K. made it comfortable. He was glad he was here with P.K. and not alone in the unbearable silence of snow.” - Z.A. Maxfield

13. “Vee never needed a reason to do something stupid. Sad thing was, most of the time I didn't either.” - Becca Fitzpatrick

14. “Silence cleared her throat, fearful her voice would come out a croak. “Is she asleep?”He blinked as if he, too, were waking from a dream, and glanced down at Mary Darling. “Aye, I’m a-thinkin’ she is—she’s stopped fussin’ at me.”Silence felt a huge smile of relief spread over her face. “She was fussing? Oh, how wonderful!”He shot her a look, one eyebrow arching. “Ye’ve taught the child to bully me, too, now?”“Oh, no,” she said hastily, embarrassed. Did he really think she bullied him? What a silly notion!” - Elizabeth Hoyt

15. “I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.” - Raymond Chandler

16. “Defend myself? I cannot defend the verbal repressions of a boy. A curmudgeonly, cantankerous, ill-tempered, counterfeit boy.” - Jamie Weise

17. “There is a master way with words which is not learned but is instead developed: a deaf man develops exceptional vision, a blind man exceptional hearing, a silent man, when given a piece of paper...” - Criss Jami

18. “This isn't your fight, Patch," I said quietly.His eyes burned with an intensity I'd never seen before. "You're mine, Angel, and don't you forget it. Your fights are my fights. What if something had happened today? It was bad enough when I thought your ghost was haunting me; I don't think I could handle the real thing.” - Becca Fitzpatrick

19. “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.” - Carl Sandburg

20. “To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.” - Louise Bourgeois

21. “Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body. The empirical use of already established language should be distinguished from its creative use. Empirical language can only be the result of creative language. Speech in the sense of empirical language - that is, the opportune recollection of a preestablished sign – is not speech in respect to an authentic language. It is, as Mallarmé said, the worn coin placed silently in my hand. True speech, on the contrary - speech which signifies, which finally renders "l'absente de tous bouquets" present and frees the sense captive in the thing - is only silence in respect to empirical usage, for it does not go so far as to become a common noun. Language is oblique and autonomous, and if it sometimes signifies a thought or a thing directly, that is only a secondary power derived from its inner life. Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.” - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

22. “Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.” - Charlotte Brontë

23. “You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.” - Khalil Gibran

24. “It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.” - Victor Hugo

25. “I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.” - Herta Müller

26. “No words. Just my finger pointing in silence. My finger silently saying, ’Unwrap me, darling.” - James Lusarde

27. “Death was silence, loss, guilt. And anger. But life led that way, anyway. From birth, it was a slow, long march to the grave. Who said that? She couldn’t remember now. But it was true. They were born dying. If they were very lucky, the dying was called aging. They reached toward if as if they were satellites in unstable orbits. And then when they got there, they were just dead. One moment in time separated the living from the ghosts.” - Michelle Sagara West

28. “Silence has its own language and in that silence he found words within himself; words for her, words for him and words for them.” - Faraaz Kazi

29. “If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.” - John Fowles

30. “The silence of a convent at night is the silence of the grave. Too far removed from the busy world without for external sounds to penetrate the thick walls, whilst within no slamming door, nor wandering foot, nor sacrilegious voice breaks in upon the stillness, the slightest noise strikes upon the ear with a fearful distinctness. ("The Monk's Story")” - Catherine Crowe

31. “Be silent and safe — silence never betrays you; Be true to your word and your work and your friend; Put least trust in him who is foremost to praise you,Nor judge of a road till it draw to the end.James Jeffery Roche” - James McAllister

32. “In every sound, the hidden silence sleeps.” - Dejan Stojanovic

33. “New Rome will be destroyedBy the attacks of new vandals.God always remains silent.” - Dejan Stojanovic

34. “Not only are animals unable to avail themselves of language to assert their own rights, but many fewer humans have a clear sense of kinship with animals than have a clear sense of kinship with other humans. Among beings with subjective states of awareness, animals are the untouchable caste, those whom human others would rather not acknowledge, let alone render assistance.” - Gary Steiner

35. “Because sometimes when someone is telling you something really important, it’s best to just let there be silence, to really think about what they’re saying. A lot of times people think they have to say something all insightful or wise or something to try and make the person feel better. But really, sometimes silence is best.” - Lauren Barnholdt

36. “El silencio es el lienzo en blanco, el marco, sobre lo que trabajas; y no tratas de ahogarlo.” - Keith Richards

37. “Tell them I came, and no one answered,That I kept my word," he said.Never the least stir made the listeners,Though every word he spakeFell echoing through the shadowiness of the still houseFrom the one man left awake:Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,And the sound of iron on stone,And how the silence surged softly backward,When the plunging hoofs were gone.” - Walter de la Mare

38. “Enlightenment is a paradoxical phenomenon. You need to be commited to become enlightenment, and to do whatever is necessary to make it happen. But at the same time you can not force enlightenment to happen by sheer will. It is like the situation with happiness: you can not force happiness to happen, but you can create the right circumstances for happiness tohappen. You need to be willing to die, to let go of your limited sense of “I”, to achieve enlightenment. I can feel a deepening thirst to die, to dissolve into the silence, in my heart and being.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

39. “I have always felt deep within myself that I do not trust that I am already OK as I am, and that I do not trust that life takes care of me. But now I discover a silent place in the depth of my inner being, where I am already one with life, where I am OK as I am. It is also a silent inner place of healing and wholeness, where I can find a love and acceptance for that which is imperfect within myself.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

40. “Fish held the silence for so long that I had to restrain myself from prodding her. That's never a good idea. Sometimes people hesitate because they don't have the courage to come out with whatever needs to be said; other times they desperately want to speak but can't find the words. Jabbing them prematurely tends to shut them up. Outwaiting them gives them the time to say more than they intend.” - adam-troy castro

41. “Not everyone talks in words.” - Nema Al-Araby

42. “The inner woman is the source of healing. The inner woman is the source of silence. The inner woman is the source of love. The inner woman is the source of belongingness with life. Embracing the inner man and woman is to discover our inner roots and wings.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

43. “Perhaps it is possible to discover more in silence than in speech. Or perhaps it is only that those who are silent among us learn to listen.” - Alice Hoffman

44. “He had never before realized the blessedness of silence - the freedom to be silent, rather, if one chose. He had never realized, somehow, that such blessedness might be his privilege. He was Doc Mc Coy, and Doc Mc Coy was born to the obligation of being one hell of a guy.” - Jim Thompson

45. “When we want to talk, we can instead listen, and let our attentiveness to another's need to speak be our silent statement.” - Bryant McGill