Silence is the virtue of fools.
~ Francis Bacon

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

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 on like a gray vegetation.
~ Jean Arp

From politics it was an easy step to silence.
~ Jane Austen

It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it.
~ Francis Beaumont

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
~ Samuel Beckett

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. [New Testament]
~ Bible

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

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

When thou art quiet and silent, then art thou as God was before nature and creature; thou art that which God then wats; thou art that whereof he made thy nature and creature: Then thou hearest and seest even with that wherewith God himself saw and heard in thee, before every thine own willing or thine own seeing began.
~ Jacob Boehme

There are times when silence has the loudest voice.
~ Leroy Brownlow

Learn taciturnity and let that be your motto!
~ Robert Burns

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
~ Thomas Carlyle

Silence is more eloquent than words.
~ Thomas Carlyle

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.
~ Thomas Carlyle

Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.
~ Thomas Carlyle

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

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
~ Thomas Carlyle

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

Silence is the unbearable repartee.
~ Gilbert K. Chesterton