Quotes about silence

„What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.“

—  Claude Monet French impressionist painter 1840 - 1926

„The desert has its holiness of silence, the crowd its holiness of conversation.“

—  Walter Elliot American priest 1842 - 1928

„While the others had got married and moved out to suburbia, I had stayed in London and got into the arts scene through friends like Robert Fraser and Barry Miles and papers like The International Times. We opened the Indica gallery with John Dunbar, Peter Asher and people like that. I heard about people like John Cage, and that he’d just performed a piece of music called 4’33” (which is completely silent) during which if someone in the audience coughed he would say, ‘See?’ Or someone would boo and he’d say, ‘See? It’s not silence—it’s music.’ I was intrigued by all of that. So these things started to be part of my life. I was listening to Stockhausen; one piece was all little plink-plonks and interesting ideas. Perhaps our audience wouldn’t mind a bit of change, we thought, and anyway, tough if they do! We only ever followed our own noses—most of the time, anyway. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was one example of developing an idea.“

—  Paul McCartney English singer-songwriter and composer 1942

The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 212

„Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear.“

—  Paul Beatty, book The Sellout

Source: The Sellout

„Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.“

—  W. H. Auden Anglo-American poet 1907 - 1973

Funeral Blues (1936)

„There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.“

—  Michel Foucault French philosopher 1926 - 1984

Source: The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

„Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.“

—  Richard Yates, A Good School

Source: A Good School

„The Arya Samaj was the first Hindu movement to take up a bold stand in this context. Maharshi Dayanand himself had showed up Muhammad for the sort of man he was. Soon after, however, the Arya Samaj was silenced effectively by a series of murders, notably that of Pandit Lekhram and Swami Shraddhananda. The British were inclined to permit fair criticism, particularly that which was based on Islamic sources. But they could not prevent Muslim assassins from taking the law in their own hands.“

—  Swami Shraddhanand Indian monk and philosopher 1856 - 1926

Goel, Sita Ram (editor) (1998). Freedom of expression: Secular theocracy versus liberal democracy. https://web.archive.org/web/20171026023112/http://www.bharatvani.org:80/books/foe/index.htm Ch. 6

„Music is the space between the notes.“

—  Claude Debussy French composer 1862 - 1918

As quoted in Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving (2001) by Jonathan G. Koomey, p. 96; since at least 2010 similar statements are also sometimes attributed to Mozart, and a similar remark, apparently one of Ben Jonson, is quoted in "Notes to Cynthia's Revels, in The Works of Ben Jonson: With Notes Critical and Explanatory, and a Biographical Memoir (1875), edited by William Gifford, Vol. 2, in notes to p. 223, on p. 551: Division, in music, is "the space between the notes of music, or the dividing of the tones."
Unsourced variants:
Music is the silence between the notes.
The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.
The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them.
Variant: Music is the space between the notes.

„But Florentine was still riding the crest of her great wave…When it lifted her high she had to hold her breath. How could she ever again be bothered by these petty everyday cares? Would she ever again feel the old anxiety on hearing these dreadful midnight confidences, in the silence heavy with breathing? The wave that bore her was like a long, slow swell. There were hollows into which she sank with all her thoughts, all her willpower, where she was no more than a wing, a feather, a fringe, borne off ever faster, ever faster…He kissed me on the cheeks. On the eyes! "What's going to happen to us, Florentine? If your father's gone and lost his job again, we'll have to live on what you can give us, poor Florentine. We can always go back on relief…“

—  Gabrielle Roy, book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 85

„We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.“

—  Ram Dass American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now 1931 - 2019

„Silence is golden when you can't think of a good answer.“

—  Muhammad Ali African American boxer, philanthropist and activist 1942 - 2016

„Maintaining silence about a dirty truth is another way of lying, a common practice in high places.“

—  Michael Parenti American academic 1933

2 MEDIA AND CULTURE, The Invisible Bloodbaths, p. 132
Dirty truths (1996), first edition

„I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.“

—  Arthur Rimbaud French Decadent and Symbolist poet 1854 - 1891

Source: A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

„The music is not in the notes,
but in the silence between.“

—  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Austrian Romantic composer 1756 - 1791

„Silence
is an ocean. Speech is a river.“

—  Rumi Iranian poet 1207 - 1273

"The Three Fish" Ch. 18 : The Three Fish, p. 196
Variant translations or adaptations:
Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.
As quoted in Teachers of Wisdom (2010) by Igor Kononenko, p. 134
Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.
As quoted in "Rumi’s wisdom" (2 October 2015) http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/10/02/character-of-the-week-rumi/, by Paulo Coelho
Context: Silence
is an ocean. Speech is a river.When the ocean is searching for you, don't walk
into the language-river. Listen to the ocean,
and bring your talky business to an end Traditional words are just babbling
in that presence, and babbling is a substitute
for sight.

„There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth.“

—  Susan B. Anthony American women's rights activist 1820 - 1906

„You burn the paper, but not the words. You silence the words, but not the thoughts. You kill the thoughts only if you kill the man. And you will find that his thoughts rise again in the minds of others - twice as strong as before.“

—  Linda Sue Park, book When My Name Was Keoko

Source: When My Name Was Keoko

„The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.“

—  Audre Lorde writer and activist 1934 - 1992