This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words." - Rachel Naomi Remen
"Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What a strange power there is in silence! How many resolutions are formed, how many sublime conquests effected, during that pause when lips are closed, and the soul secretly feels the eye of her Maker upon her! They are the strong ones of earth who know how to keep silence when it is a pain and grief unto them, and who gives time to their own souls to wax strong against temptation." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We live in succession, in division, in part, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A judicious silence is always better than truth spoken without charity." - Saint Francis de Sales NULL
"Silence is the sister of complaisance." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
"To silence criticism is to silence freedom." - Sidney Hook
"In silence many virtues lie." - Sophocles NULL
"If speech is silvern, then silence is golden." - Midrash or The Midrash NULL
"The highest praise is silence. Even a pearl of infinite value, any praise given it detracts from it." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"If silence be good for the wise, how much the better for fools." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"Your silence is better than your speech." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"Thoughts work in silence, so does virtue." - Thomas Carlyle
"Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together." - Thomas Carlyle
"In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance." - Thomas Carlyle
"Silence is more eloquent than words." - Thomas Carlyle
"Speech is of time, silence is of eternity." - Thomas Carlyle
"Thought will not work except in silence." - Thomas Carlyle
"When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze." - Thomas Carlyle
"Silence is Wisdom, when Speaking is Folly." - Thomas Fuller
"Silence is the cornerstone of character." - Tom Brown, Jr.
"The heart beats louder and the soul hears quicker in silence and solitude." - Wendell Phillips
"Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue; and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves." - William Hazlitt
"The silence of a friend commonly amounts to treachery." - William Hazlitt
"The spiritual life is nothing else but the working of the Spirit of God within us, and therefore our own silence must be a great part of our preparation for it, and much speaking or delight in it will often no small hindrance of that good which we can only have from hearing what the Spirit and voice of God speaketh within us." - William Law
"Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not be doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness." - André Maurois, born born Emile Salomon Wilhelm Herzog
"Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most." - Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman
"Silence is the ultimate weapon of power. " - Charles de Gaulle, fully Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle
"So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public." - Marquis de Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
"My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated." - Edward Wadie Saïd
"Silence is all we dread. There's Ransom in a Voice - but Silence is Infinity. " - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
"It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it. " - Francis Beaumont
"The coldness of our love is the silence of our hearts toward God. Without this we may pronounce prayers, but we do not pray; for what shall lead us to mate upon the laws of God, if it be not love of Him who has made these laws? Let our hearts be full of love then, and they will pray." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
"We cease to pray to God as soon as we cease to love Him, as soon as we cease to thirst for His perfections. The coldness of our love is the silence of our hearts toward God. Without this we may pronounce prayers, but we do not pray; for what shall lead us to mate upon the laws of God if it be not the love of Him who has made these laws? Let our hearts be full of love, then, and they will pray." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
"There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul. God is whispering to us well-nigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God." - Frederick William Faber
"No risk attends the meed that silence brings." - Augustus or Augustus Caesar, fully Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, NULL
"I have often thought it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf for a few days at some time during his early adult life. Darkness would make him more appreciative of sight; silence would teach him the joys of sound. " - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood. " - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past while we silence the rebels of the present." - Henry Steele Commager
"Who tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. " - Isak Dinesen, pen name of Baroness Karen Blixen
"It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they ''speak with the accent of natives'' they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds." - Ivan Illich