Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer, This land stares at the sun in a huge silence Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear. Inarticulate, arctic, Not written on by history, emptyas paper, It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes Older than love, and lost in the miles. 722

-Scott, F(rancis) R(eginald)
  Of Canada.'Laurentian Shield'.

Decency is Indecency's conspiracy of silence.

-Shaw, George Bernard
  Man and Superman,'Maxims for Revolutionists: Decency'.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

-Shaw, George Bernard
Back to Methuselah.

He has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

-Smith, Rev Sydney
Of Lord Macaulay. Quoted in Lady Holland Memoir (1855), vol.1. ch.11.

Woman, silence makes a woman beautiful.

-Sophocles
Ajax, 293 (translated by H Lloyd-Jones,1994).

The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silenceöfree of the networks of dead speech.

-Stark, Dame Freya Madeleine
  Perseus in theWind.

   We are in such haste to be doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget that one thing, of which these are but the partsönamely, to live.

-Stevenson, Robert Louis
Virginibus Puerisque,'WalkingTours'.

The cruellest lies are often told in silence.

-Stevenson, Robert Louis
Virginibus Puerisque,'Truth of Intercourse'.

Musicians paint their pictures on silenceöwe provide the music, and you provide the silence.

-Boleslawowich
Addressing an audience at Carnegie Hall. Quoted in Derek Watson Music Quotations (1991).

For words divide and rend; But silence is most noble till the end.

-Swinburne, Algernon Charles
  Atlanta in Calydon, chorus,'Who hath given man speech'.

There twice a day the Severn fills; The salt sea-water passes by, And hushes half the babbling Wye, And makes a silence in the hills.

-Tennyson
  In Memoriam A.H.H., canto19, l.5^8.

All night has the casement jessamine stirred To the dancers dancing in tune; Till a silence fell with the waking bird, And a hush with the setting moon.

-Tennyson
  Maud, pt.1, sect.22, stanza 3, l.864^7.

   It is little rift within the lute, That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all.

-Tennyson
  Idylls of the King,'Merlin andVivien', l.388^90.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness.God is the friend of silence. See how natureötrees, flowers, grassögrows in silence; see the stars, themoon and thesun, how they move insilence† We need silence to be able to touch souls.

-Bojaxhiu
  A Gift for God,'Willing Slaves to theWill of God'.

   The men, the music piercing that solitude And silence, told me truths I had not dreamed, And have forgotten since their beauty passed.

-Thomas, (Philip) Edward
  'Tears'.

Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal silence: truths that wake, To perish never: Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor man nor boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterlyabolish or destroy! Hence in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

-Wordsworth,William
c.1802^1803  'Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood', stanza 9 (published1807).

Our master Caesar is in the tent Where the maps are spread, His eyes fixed upon nothing, A hand under his head. 934 Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.

-Yeats,W(illiam) B(utler)
  'Long-Legged Fly', l.5^10. Collected in Last Poems (1939).