W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Speech is the small change of silence.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Silence is the language of inertia.

Sometimes you have to be silent to be heard.

Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

Silence is not only golden, it is seldom misquoted.

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.

Silence is a figure of speech, unanswerable, short, cold, but terribly severe.

The sheer act of listening speaks volumes that even a great speech can't communicate.

Silence is one great art of conversation.

I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.

Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.

That's the secret: be interesting. If you can't be interesting, shut up. There's nothing wrong with silence.

Silence is never-ending speech. Vocal speech obstructs the other speech of silence. In silence one is in intimate contact with the surroundings. Language is only a medium for communicating one's thoughts to another. Silence is ever speaking.

Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.

If we were meant to talk more than listen, we would have two mouths and one ear.

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.

You can't improve on saying nothing.

Silence is become his mother tongue.

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.

If you do not know his language, you will never understand a foreigner's silence.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.