This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"If we are to be saved from our futility we must recover the faculty of being still: we must make an enclave of silence within our own souls." - Gerald Vann
"The speech of created beings is with sounds. The word of God is silence. God’s secret world of love can be nothing else but silence." - Simone Weil
"If everybody thought before they spoke, the silence would be deafening." - George Barzan
"Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge." - Aimé Fernand David Césaire
"All about me may be silence and darkness, yet within me, in the spirit, is music and brightness, and color flashes through all my thoughts." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. You are a child of the universe with no less than the trees and the stars." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson
"Lying is done with words, and also with silence." - Adrienne Rich, fully Adrienne Cecil Rich
"I have found long since that silence is an antidote to harm." - Aeschylus NULL
"God is to be found in silence, but She is also knowable while giving the kids lunch, negotiating for a higher salary, and cleaning the bathtub." - Alan Cohen
"Time is one's best friend, teaching best of all the wisdom of silence." - Amos Bronson Alcott
"A friend is, above all, one who judges not... For beyond and above our differences we meet on common ground, and I am his friend. And, when we are together, I can keep silence, having nothing to fear from him for my inner gardens, my mountains and my ravines - for he will not trample them." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Giving much thought to the future is vain. Only one task is worthy of the doing and that is to express the Here and Now. And to express means building, out of the infinite diversity of the Here and Now, a visage dominating it. It means shaping silence out of stones. Any other claim is but an ado of words that weave the wind." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"The domain of the spirit, where it can spread its wings, is - silence." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Love is, above all, a communion in silence, and to love is to contemplate." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Man’s dwelling place, who could found you on reasoning, or build your walls with logic? You exist, and you exist not. You are, and are not. True, you are made out of diverse materials, but for your discovery an inventive mind was needed. Thus if a man pulled his house to pieces, with the design of understanding it, all he would have before him would be heaps of bricks and stones and tiles. he would not be able to discover therein the silence, the shadows and the privacy they bestowed. Nor would he see what service this mass of bricks, stones and tiles could render him, now that they lacked the heart and soul of the architect, the inventive mind which dominated them. For in mere stone the heart and soul of man have no place. But since reasoning can deal with only such material things as bricks and stones and tiles, and there is no reasoning about the heart and soul that dominate them and thus transform them into silence - inasmuch as the heart and soul have no concern with the rules of logic or the science of numbers - this is where I step in and impose my will. I, the architect; I, who have a heart and soul; I, who wield the power of transforming stone into silence. I step in and mold that clay, which is the raw material, into the likeness of the creative vision that comes to me from God; and not through any faculty of reason. Thus, taken solely by the savor it will have, I build my civilization; as poets build their poems, bending phrases to their will and changing words, without being called upon to justify the phrasing of the changes, but taken solely by the savor these will have, vouched by their hearts." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered. For the American citadel is a man. Not man in general. Not man in the abstract. Not the majority of men. But man. That man. His worth. His uniqueness." - Archibald MacLeish
"In the very depths of your soul, dig a grave; let it be as some forgotten spot to which no path leads; and there in the eternal silence bury the wrongs which you have suffered. Your heart will feel as if a load had fallen from it, and a divine peace come to abide with you." - Author Unknown NULL
"Never speak unless you can improve on silence." - Author Unknown NULL
"Cautious silence is the holy of holies of worldly wisdom." - Baltasar Gracián
"Calumnies are answered best with silence." - Ben Jonson
"Silence is the mother of Truth." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"Silence, the special ornament of the ignorant in the assembly of the wise." - Bhartrihari NULL
"The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." - Blaise Pascal
"When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have the place and time been allotted to me?... The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." - Blaise Pascal
"Money buys everything except love, personality, freedom, immortality, silence, peace." - Carl Sandburg
"Conversation is the music of the mind, an intellectual orchestra, where all the instruments should bear a part, but where none should play together. Each of the performers should have a just appreciation of his own powers, otherwise an unskillful novice who might usurp the first fiddle, would infallibly get into a scrape. To prevent these mistakes, a good master of the band will be very particular in the assortment of the performers; if too dissimilar, there will be no harmony, if too few, there will be no variety; and, if too numerous, there will be no order, for the presumption of one prater, might silence the eloquence of a Burke, or the wit of a Sheridan, as a single kettle-drum would drown the finest solo of a Gionowich or a Jordini." - Charles Caleb Colton
"The wise man… when he must govern, know how to do nothing… In complete silence, his voice will be like thunder. His movements will be invisible, like those of a spirit, but the powers of heaven will go with them. Unconcerned, doing nothing, he will see all things grow ripe around him. Where will he find time to govern?" - Chuang Tzu, also spelled Chuang-tsze, Chuang Chou, Zhuangzi, Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze
"The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth are hidden in the super-luminous darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret. For this darkness, though of deepest obscurity, is yet radiantly clear; and, though beyond touch and sight, it more than fills our unseeing minds with splendours of transcendent beauty." - Dionysius of Halicarnassus NULL
"It is never so difficult to speak as when we are ashamed of our silence." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together." - Edmund Burke
"Most of the crimes which disturb the internal peace of society are produced by the restraints which the necessary, but unequal, laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind, by confining to a few the possession of those objects that are coveted by many. Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries, and the fear of future dangers, all contribute to inflame the mind, and to silence the voice of pity. From such motives almost every page of history has been stained with civil blood." - Edward Gibbon
"Let to get in touch with silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose... There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden, or even your bathtub." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross