Evandalism.  n. Using spray paint to write “John 3:16″ on public structures.
~ Pete Briscoe, in Belief Matters: Grappling With the Essentials of the Christian Faith, page 117.

The trouble with missions in the average church is that it’s a little like National Blueberry Week — nobody’s opposed to it, but not too many are fired up about it either.
~ Richard Lewis, in  Fresh Ideas for Preaching, Worship & Evangelism, by Christianity Today.  page 154

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RELATED CONTENT

• Index To Great Quotes

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If adversity hath killed his thousands, prosperity hath killed his ten thousands; therefore adversity is to be preferred. The one deceives, the other instructs; the one is miserably happy, the other happily miserable; and therefore many philosophers have voluntarily sought adversity and commend it in their precepts.
~ Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do no pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.
~ Phillips Brooks.

In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends.
~ John Churton Collins

As sure as God puts His children in the furnace He will be in the furnace with them.
~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Fiery trials make golden Christians.
~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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RELATED CONTENT

• Index To Great Quotes

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Worry often gives a small thing a great shadow.
~ Swedish Proverb

Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.
~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Fear not tomorrow, God is already there.
~ Unknown

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RELATED CONTENT

• Trivia Index
• Index to Great Quotes
• Happiness – Select Quotes
• The Pursuit of God
• What Is Happiness?

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Memory is the mother of all wisdom.
~ Aeschylus

To be satisfied with a little, is the greatest wisdom; and he that increaseth his riches, increaseth his cares; but a contented mind is a hidden treasure, and trouble findeth it not.
~ Akhenaton

Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Thy power, and Thy wisdom infinite.
~ Augustine of Hippo, in Confessions

Patience is the companion of wisdom.
~ Augustine of Hippo

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.
~ Francis Bacon

There are in fact four very significant stumbling-blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge.
~ Roger Bacon

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
~ Honore de Balzac

Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe.
~ Josh Billings

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word.
~ Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (NY: Fawcett, 1994), page 6.

To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Tis sometimes the height of wisdom to feign stupidity.
~ Marcus Porcius Cato

In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it – thou art a fool.
~ Lord Chesterfield

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.
~ Cicero

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Master said, He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.
~ Confucius, in Analects

By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitations, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
~ Confucius

Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men.
~ Confucius

A word to the wise ain’t necessary, it’s the stupid ones who need the advice.
~ Bill Cosby

Instead of seeking wisdom, liberals desire to be seen as clever by being counterintuitive, crazy, and outre. ~ Ann Coulter, in The Church of Liberalism

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.
~ Norman Cousins

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.
~ Charles Dickens

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.
~ Benjamin Disraeli

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind.
~ Desiderius Gerhard Erasmus, in The Praise of Folly

Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom.
~ Euripides

Cleverness is not wisdom.
~ Euripides

Silence is true wisdom’s best reply.
~ Euripides

Some wisdom you must learn from one who’s wise.
~ Euripides

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.
~ Martin Fischer

Silence is not always a Sign of Wisdom, but Babbling is ever a folly.
~ Benjamin Franklin

The doors of wisdom are never shut.
~ Benjamin Franklin

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.
~ Benjamin Franklin

It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
~ Mahatma Ghandi

My proof convinces the ignorant, and the wise man’s proof convinces me. But he whose reasoning falls between wisdom and ignorance, I neither can convince him, nor can he convince me.
~ Khalil Gibran

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.
~ Khalil Gibran

Wisdom is found only in truth.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.
~ Baltasar Gracian

In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
~ Alfred Whitney Griswold, in Essays on Education

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard cold wisdom is required, too, for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom invariably accomplishes evil.
~ Robert Heinlein

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.
~ Horace

To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.
~ Elbert Hubbard

Wisdom is a sacred communion.
~ Victor Hugo

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
~ William James

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
~ Thomas Jefferson

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.
~ Samuel Johnson

Wisdom is knowing what to do next; Skill is knowing how to do it, and Virtue is doing it.
~ David Starr Jordan

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
~ Immanuel Kant

A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.
~ Louis L’Amour

Wisdom is the quality that keeps you from getting into situations where you need it.
~ Doug Larson

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk.
~ Doug Larson

It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and say the opposite.
~ Sam Levenson

The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.
~ C.S. Lewis

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
~ Abraham Lincoln

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
~ Walter Lippmann

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
~ Naguib Mahfouz

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
~ H. L. Mencken

Six essential qualities that are the key to success: Sincerity, personal integrity, humility, courtesy, wisdom, charity.
~ William Menninger

Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The result proves the wisdom of the act.
~ Ovid

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
~ Bible, Colossians 3:16-17

He went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. And Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.”
~ Bible, Mark 6:1-4

For wisdom shall enter into thine heart, and knowledge shall be pleasant unto thy soul; discretion shall watch over thee, understanding shall keep thee.
~ Bible, Proverbs 2:10,11

A man’s wisdom gives him patience; it is to his glory to overlook an offense.
~ Bible, Proverbs 19:11

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.
~ Chinese Proverb

All the wisdom of the world consists of shouting with the majority.
~ Thomas B. Reed

Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.
~ Theodore Isaac Rubin

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
~ Bertrand Russell

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
~ George Santayana

Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.
~ Tobias Smollett

Wisdom begins in wonder.
~ Socrates

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.
~ Sophocles

Wisdom outweighs any wealth.
~ Sophocles

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.
~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Wisdom oft lurks beneath a tattered coat.
~Caecilius Statius

What a man knows at 50 that he did not know at 20 is, for the most part incommunicable. The knowledge he has acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions—a knowledge gained not by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love—the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and other men; and perhaps, too, a little faith, a little reverence for things one cannot see.
~ Adlai Stevenson

It is strange how often a heart must be broken before the years can make it wise.
~ Sara Teasdale

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
~ Henry David Thoreau

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.
~ Mark Twain

Wisdom begins at the end.
~ Daniel Webster

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
~ Edith Wharton

Wisdom is not finally tested in the schools, Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof.
~ Walt Whitman

Turn your wounds into wisdom.
~ Oprah Winfrey

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
~ Lin Yutang

A wise old owl sat on an oak;
The more he saw the less he spoke;
The less he spoke the more he heard;
Why aren’t we like that wise old bird?

An ill life will effectually drown the voice of the most eloquent ministry.

Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.

As sure as God puts His children in the furnace He will be in the furnace with them.

Be masters of your Bibles, brethren, whatever other works you have not searched, be at home with the writings of the prophets and apostles.

By perseverance the snail reached the ark.

Faith is reason at rest in God.

Fiery trials make golden Christians.

I do not look for any other means of converting men beyond the simple preaching of the Gospel and the opening of men’s ears to hear it.

Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the Book widens and deepens with our years.

Quietude, which some men cannot abide because it reveals their inward poverty, is as a palace of cedar to the wise, for along its hallowed courts the King in His beauty deigns to walk.

The ministry is a matter which wears the brain and strains the heart, and drains out the life of a man if he attends to it as he should.

We should pray when we are in a praying mood, for it would be sinful to neglect so fair an opportunity. We should pray when we are not in a proper mood, for it would be dangerous to remain in so unhealthy a condition.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

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Silence is the secret to sanity.
~ Astrid Alauda

The deepest rivers make least din, the silent soule doth most abound in care.
~ William Alexander

Silence is golden when you can’t think of a good answer.
~ Muhammad Ali, in More Than a Hero

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

Silence is a text easy to misread.
~ A. A. Attanasio, in The Eagle and the Sword

He who does not know how to be silent will not know how to speak.
~ Ausonius

Silence is the virtue of fools.
~ Francis Bacon

An inability to stay quiet is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.
~ Walter Bagehot

It is the space between the notes that makes the music.
~ Noah Benshea

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
~ Josh Billings

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation, as allowed by Cicero himself, who says, ‘there is not only an art, but an eloquence in it.’ A well bred woman may easily and effectually promote the most useful and elegant conversation without speaking a word. The modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence.
~ Tom Blair

It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgment to be silent.
~ Jean de la Bruyere

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.
~ Octavia Butler

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
~ Thomas Carlyle

Speech is great, but silence is greater.
~ Thomas Carlyle, in Past and Present

I think the first virtue is to restrain the tongue; he approaches nearest to gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right.
~ Cato the Elder

Consider in silence whatever any one says: speech both conceals and reveals the inner soul of man.
~ Marcus Porcius Cato

Silence is the unbearable repartee.
~ G. K. Chesterton

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.
~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Silence is the true friend that never betrays.
~ Confucius

Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.
~ Charles De Gaulle

Silence is the mother of truth.
~ Benjamin Disraeli

If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z, X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.
~ John Dryden, in Astroea Redux

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
~ Will Durant

Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most.
~ Bob Dylan

In silence man can most readily preserve his integrity.
~ Meister Eckhart

Speech may be barren; but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs.
~ George Eliot

I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.
~ George Eliot

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Silence is true wisdom’s best reply.
~ Euripides

Silence is the wit of fools.
~ Anatole France

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.
~ Benjamin Franklin

Silence is not always a Sign of Wisdom, but Babbling is ever a folly.
~ Benjamin Franklin

Writing is a struggle against silence.
~ Carlos Fuentes

True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable.
~ D.T. Gentry

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in an clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.
~ Mahatma Ghandi

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind, yet strangely, I am ungrateful to those teachers.
~ Kahlil Gibran

Silence heals foolishness.
~ Baltasar Gracian, in A Pocket Mirror For Heroes

A man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.
~ Thomas Hardy

Silence is exhilarating at first – as noise is – but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.
~ Edward Hoagland

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
~ Aldous Huxley, in Music at Night

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.
~ Aldous Huxley

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
~ Aldous Huxley

It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.
~ William James

Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.
~ Samuel Johnson

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.
~ Samuel Johnson

The most profound statements are often said in silence.
~ Lynn Johnston, in For Better or For Worse

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Everybody should have his personal sounds to listen for – sounds that will make him exhilarated and alive or quite and calm…. One of the greatest sounds of them all – and to me it is a sound – is utter, complete silence.
~ Andre Kostelanetz

Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.
~ John Lahr

There are grammatical errors even in his silence.
~ Stanislaw J. Lec, in Unkempt Thoughts

From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
~ C.S. Lewis, in The Apologists Evening Prayer

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
~ Abraham Lincoln

‘Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
~ Abraham Lincoln

Nothing is more useful than silence.
~ Menander of Athens

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
~ Thomas Merton

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
~ W.S. Merwin

God’s poet is silence! His song is unspoken,
And yet so profound, so loud, and so far,
It fills you, it thrills you with measures unbroken,
And as soft, and as fair, and as far as a star.
~ Joaquin Miller

Not merely an absence of noise, Real Silence begins when a reasonable being withdraws from the noise in order to find peace and order in his inner sanctuary.
~ Peter Minard

Oppression can only survive through silence.
~ Carmen de Monteflores

It is especially in private personal intercourse that God can bless and sanctify you. In the church, the understanding is kept active, and you have the ordinances of preaching, united prayer and praise, to keep you occupied. But we do not there always know whether the heart is really dealing with God, is taking delight in Him. This takes place in solitude. O, accustom yourself, then, to be alone with the Lord your God. Not only speak to Him: let Him speak to you: let your heart be the temple in whose holy silence His voice is heard. Rest in God: then will God say of your heart: This is my rest, here will I dwell. (Ps. 122:13,14)
~ Andrew Murray, in The Lord’s Day

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.
~ Mother Teresa

In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.
~ Martin Niemoller

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.
~ Blaise Pascal

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

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
~ Sylvia Plath, in The Bell Jar

Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.
~ Bible, Proverbs 17:28

Silence is medication for sorrow.
~ Arab Proverb

Silence is a fence around wisdom.
~ German Proverb

Speech is silver; silence is golden.
~ German proverb

A silent mouth is sweet to hear.
~ Irish Proverb

To silence another, first be silent yourself.
~ Latin Proverb

Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.
~ Latin proverb

It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few.
~ Pythagoras

No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.
~ Sam Rayburn

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

Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrusts himself.
~ François de la Rochefoucauld

Silence is more musical than any song.
~ Christina Rossetti

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words; a lie may be told in silence, by equivocation, by the accent on a syllable, by a glance of the eye attaching a peculiar significance to a sentence; but all of these kinds of lies are worse and baser by many degrees than a lie plainly worded.
~ John Ruskin, in Modern Painters

Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant.
~ Saadi

It is a great thing to know the season for speech and the season for silence.
~ Seneca

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.
~ William Shakespeare, in Much Ado about Nothing, Act 2 scene 1

The silence often of pure innocence
Persuades when speaking fails.
~ William Shakespeare, in The Winter’s Tale

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
~ George Bernard Shaw, in Back to Methuselah

I believe in the discipline of silence and could talk for hours about it.
~ George Bernard Shaw

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
~ Edith Sitwell

He had occasional flashes of silence, that made his conversation perfectly delightful.
~ Sydney Smith, referring to Macaulay

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.
~ Baruch Spinoza

I have often lamented that we cannot close our ears with as much ease as we can our eyes.
~ Richard Steele

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
~ Publilius Syrus, in Maxims

Their silence is sufficient praise.
~ Terence

Her hearing was keener than his, and she heard silences he was unaware of.
~ D.M. Thomas

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
~ James Thurber

A good word is an easy obligation; but not to speak ill, requires only our silence, which costs nothing.
~ John Tillotson

Whoever will listen will hear the speaking Heaven. This is definitely not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to listen, for listening is not today a part of popular religion. We are at the opposite end of the pole from there. Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God. But we may take heart. To a people caught in the tempest of the last great conflict God says, `Be still, and know that I am God,’ (Ps 46:10) and still He says it, as if He means to tell us that our strength and safety lie not in noise but in silence.
~ A.W. Tozer, in The Pursuit of God

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.
~ Martin Fraquhar Tupper

The pause – – that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence, which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.
~ Mark Twain

Silence is a source of great strength.
~ Lao Tzu

There is a wide difference between speaking to deceive, and being silent to be impenetrable.
~ Voltaire

To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.
~ Samuel Butler

Quietude, which some men cannot abide because it reveals their inward poverty, is as a palace of cedar to the wise, for along its hallowed courts the King in His beauty deigns to walk.
~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.