Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Jacques Maritain

The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence - even mental.

Absolute | Character | Doubt | Philosophy | Silence | Truth |

Jean Baptiste Massillon

I love a serious preacher, who speaks for my sake and not for his own; who seeks my salvation, and not his own vainglory. He best deserves to be heard who uses speech only to clothe his thoughts, and his thoughts only to promote truth and virtue.

Character | Love | Salvation | Speech | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |

William Penn

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

Body | Character | Mind | Rest | Silence | Spirit |

Max Picard

Silence is man's centre... Today silence is malfunctioning noise.

Character | Man | Noise | Silence | Wisdom |

Publius Syrus

Meet an accusation with silence and you make it sharper.

Character | Silence |

James R. Quirk

The value of silence in art is its stimulation to the imagination.

Art | Character | Imagination | Silence | Art | Value |

Shimon HaTzaddik

For his entire life he was in the company of wise men and Of all the things beneficial to one’s body, silence is the best. [paraphrase]

Body | Character | Life | Life | Men | Silence | Wise |

Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye.

Character | Friend | Nothing | Silence |

W. W. Battershall

What a power has Death to awe and hush the voices of this earth! How mute we stand when that presence confronts us, and we look upon the silence he has wrought in a human life! We can only gaze, and bow our heads, and creep with our broken stammering utterances under the shelter of some great word which God has spoken, and in which we see through the history of human sorrow the outstretching and overshadowing of the eternal arms.

Awe | Death | Earth | Eternal | God | History | Life | Life | Power | Silence | Sorrow | Wisdom | God |

Christian Nestell Bovee

Love delights in paradoxes. Saddest when it has most reason to be gay, sights are the signs of its greatest joy, and silence is the expression of its yearning tenderness.

Joy | Love | Reason | Silence | Tenderness | Wisdom |

Bruce Burton

The observation is that, generally speaking, poverty of speech is the outward evidence of poverty of mind

Evidence | Mind | Observation | Poverty | Speech | Wisdom |

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

The main reason why silence is so efficacious an element of repute is, first, because of that magnification which proverbially belongs to the unknown; and, secondly, because silence provokes no man's envy, and wounds no man's self-love.

Envy | Love | Man | Reason | Self | Self-love | Silence | Wisdom |

William Congreve

Even silence may be eloquent in love.

Love | Silence | Wisdom |