52 Silence Quotes

Silence often speaks louder than words, offering a sanctuary of peace and an opportunity for introspection. In a world that rarely stops talking, the power of silence is a precious and sometimes overlooked treasure. Whether it's found in moments of solitude, the tranquility of nature, or the quiet connection between individuals, silence can be profoundly impactful. In this post, we've curated a collection of the top 52 silence quotes to inspire a deeper appreciation for the quiet moments that add richness and meaning to our lives. Prepare to explore the eloquence of silence through the wisdom of poets, thinkers, and philosophers who have beautifully captured its essence.

1. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field.I'll meet you there.When the soul lies down in that grassthe world is too full to talk about.” - Rumi

2. “and when we speak we are afraidour words will not be heardnor welcomedbut when we are silentwe are still afraidSo it is better to speakrememberingwe were never meant to survive” - Audre Lorde

3. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” - George Eliot

4. “The cruelest lies are often told in silence.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

5. “In Silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves.” - Rumi

6. “Your silence will not protect you.” - Audre Lorde

7. “A star shoots bleeding across the skyline, a companion to the black wind. Silence comes sweeping across everything.” - Joe Bousquet

8. “At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right” - Miguel de Unamuno

9. “He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.” - Elbert Hubbard

10. “O dear Himalaya...why are you so amazing, can I kiss your peak or can I just let your silence speak...O dear Himalaya...” - Santosh Kalwar

11. “Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.” - Brennan Manning

12. “I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished.” - Djuna Barnes

13. “Never miss a good chance to shut up.” - Will Rogers

14. “What silence rules the ghostly hoursThat guard the close of human sleep!(“The Testimony of the Suns”)” - George Sterling

15. “It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.” - Christopher Hitchens

16. “WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.There is my desert.” - Edmond Jabès

17. “All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this. Even when everything was going well, as it often did. I can say that much. That it often did. I have been lucky. But even then, for instance in the middle of an embrace and someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence. Years might go by and I did not think about it, but that does not mean that I did not long to be there. And now I am here, and it is almost exactly as I had imagined it.” - Per Petterson

18. “Hey Meg! Communication implies sound. Communion doesn't.' He sent her a brief image of walking silently through the woods, the two of them alone together., their feet almost noiseless on the rusty carpet of pine needles. They walked without speaking, without touching, and yet they were as close as it is possible for two human beings to be. They climbed up through the woods, coming out into the brilliant sunlight at the top of the hill. A few sumac trees showed their rusty candles. Mountain laurel, shiny, so dark a green the leaves seemed black in the fierceness of sunlight, pressed toward the woods. Meg and Calvin had stretched out in the thick, late-summer grass, lying on their backs, gazing up into the shimmering blue of sky, a vault interrupted only by a few small clouds.And she had been as happy, she remembered, as it is possible to be, and as close to Calvin as she had ever been to anybody in her life, even Charles Wallace, so close that their separate bodies, daisies and buttercups joining rather than dividing them, seemed a single enjoyment of summer and sun and each other. That was surely the purest kind of thing.Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words.” - Madeleine L'Engle

19. “Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.” - Thomas Carlyle

20. “[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.” - Wallace Stegner

21. “He sat and looked at her. “How is Mary Darling?”“Fast asleep after playing and having a bath,” she said. “The nursery is lovely.”“I’m glad you like it.”“Rose and Annie are obviously practiced nursemaids, and what is even better, they seem to like Mary, and she them.”He grunted. “It would take a hard heart to turn away from my Mary Darling.”A smile curved the corners of her lips. “You didn’t seem too enamored of her when you first met.”“She has a forceful personality, as do I. We just took a bit to get to know one another.” - Elizabeth Hoyt

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

23. “If you are involved with the intensity of crescendo situations, with the intensity of tragedy, you might begin to see the humor of these situations as well. As in music, when we hear the crescendo building, suddenly if the music stops, we begin to hear the silence as part of the music.” - CHOGYAM TRUNGPA

24. “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

25. “Go back,go back to sleep.Yes, you are allowed.You who have no Love in your heart,you can go back to sleep.The power of Loveis exclusive to us,you can go back to sleep.I have been burntby the fire of Love.You who have no such yearning in your heart,go back to sleep.The path of Love,has seventy-two folds and countless facets.Your love and religionis all about deceit, control and hypocrisy,go back to sleep.I have torn to pieces my robe of speech,and have let go of the desire to converse.You who are not naked yet,you can go back to sleep.” - Rumi

26. “Kyoko sniffs, unable to speak. Sometimes saying nothing means most of all.” - Sandy Fussell

27. “the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.” - Suzanne Collins

28. “Realize this – your anger with God does not drive a wedge between you and Him. It is your silence that drives the wedge. - Prodigal Life” - Pauline Creeden

29. “Poems are difficult to silence.” - Stephen Greenblatt

30. “When clouds of pain loom in the skyWhen a shadow of sadness flickers byWhen a tear finds its way to the eyeWhen fear keeps the loneliness aliveI try and console my heartWhy is it that you cry? I askThis is only what life impartsThese deep silences withinHave been handed out to all by timeEveryone’s story has a little sorrowEveryone’s share has a little sunshineNo need for water in your eyesEvery moment can be a new lifeWhy do you let them pass you by?Oh heart, why is it that you cry?” - Javed Akhtar

31. “Words.I’m surrounded by thousands of words. Maybe millions. Cathedral. Mayonnaise. Pomegranate.Mississippi. Neapolitan. Hippopotamus.Silky. Terrifying. Iridescent.Tickle. Sneeze. Wish. Worry.Words have always swirled around me like snowflakes—each one delicate and different, each one melting untouched in my hands.Deep within me, words pile up in huge drifts. Mountains of phrases and sentences and connected ideas. Clever expressions. Jokes. Love songs.From the time I was really little—maybe just a few months old—words were like sweet, liquid gifts, and I drank them like lemonade. I could almost taste them. They made my jumbled thoughts and feelings have substance. My parents have always blanketed me with conversation. They chattered and babbled. They verbalized and vocalized. My father sang to me. My mother whispered her strength into my ear.Every word my parents spoke to me or about me I absorbed and kept and remembered. All of them.I have no idea how I untangled the complicated process of words and thought, but it happened quickly and naturally. By the time I was two, all my memories had words, and all my words had meanings.But only in my head.I have never spoken one single word. I am almost eleven years old.” - Sharon M. Draper

32. “Your mind has a flood of questions.There is but one teacherWho can answer them.Who is that teacher?Your silence-loving heart.” - Sri Chinmoy

33. “First, silence makes us pilgrims. Secondly, silence guards the fire within. Thirdly, silence teaches us to speak.” - Henri J.M. Nouwen

34. “When a woman who has much to say says nothing, her silence can be deafening.” - Margaret Landon

35. “There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.” - James Robertson

36. “But even then I knew how it was going to be, I could feel the coming silence in the long, poisonous pauses that expanded as the night progressed.” - Sue Miller

37. “Perfect prayer does not consist in many words, silent remembering and pure intention raises the heart to that supreme Power.” - Amit Ray

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

39. “Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper.” - Terry Tempest Williams

40. “It is easy to see the glow but hard to recognize the awakening of silence.” - Dejan Stojanovic

41. “A word into the silence thrown always finds its echo somewhere where silence opens hidden lexicons.” - Dejan Stojanovic

42. “If I asked you to do something for me, I don't suppose you'd listen?" When he had my attention, he continued, "I'm going to take you home. Try to forget tonight happened. Try to act normal, especially around Hank. Don't mention my name."By way of an answer, I shot him a black look and swung out of the Tahoe. He followed suit, coming around to my side. "What kind of answer is that?" He asked, but his voice wasn't nearly so gruff.” - Becca Fitzpatrick

43. “I don't have the body for this," I quipped, lifting my chin to a voluptous woman nearby who shook her hips zealously to the beat. "No curves."Jev's eyes held mine. "Are you asking my opinion?” - Becca Fitzpatrick

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

45. “I had a day when I was busy in the world, where the activity created a turmoil on the surface of my consciousness like waves on the surface of the ocean, which made it difficult to see through the waves to the inner silence. It reminded me that we need to develop both the capacity to use the mind when engaged in activity and social relations, and to be able to let go of the activity and to come in contact with the deep inner silence. The relationship between being active in the world and in social relations and the inner silence is like the relationship between the waves on the surface of the ocean and the deep inner silence on the bottom of the ocean.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

46. “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

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

48. “An even more pointed example of the the power of the silence tabu in libraries occurred in Duluth in 1981. The police were pursuing a fugitive from justice who ran into the public library. Uniformed police surrounded the building, and the library director was notified that only unobtrusive plainclothesmen were entering the building. Their instructions: “When you find him, overpower him. Quietly.” It was done, and only a few people in the crowded building saw a handcuffed man being ushered past the checkout counter. “See,” one librarian remarked quietly to an amazed person, “that’s what happens when you don’t pay your book fines.” - Ray B. Browne

49. “Staying silent is like a slow growing cancer to the soul and a trait of a true coward. There is nothing intelligent about not standing up for yourself. You may not win every battle. However, everyone will at least know what you stood for—YOU.” - Shannon L. Alder

50. “She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so she could see the stars. They always eased her loneliness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her.” - Kristin Cashore

51. “the unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.” - Terry Tempest Williams

52. “I would like to sing someone to sleep,to sit beside someone and be there.I would like to rock you and sing softlyand go with you to and from sleep.I would like to be the one in the housewho knew: The night was cold.And I would like to listen in and listen outinto you, into the world, into the woods.The clocks shout to one another striking,and one sees to the bottom of time.And down below one last, strange man walks byand rouses a strange dog.And after that comes silence.I have laid my eyes upon you wide;and they hold you gently and let you gowhen something stirs in the dark.” - Rainer Maria Rilke