Reticence Quotes

When it comes to letting the world in on the secrets of his heart, he has about as much shrinking reticence as a steam calliope.

The right to reticence seems earned only by having nothing to hide.

The name Shatner is Austrian and partly Germanic, and there's Germanic reticence and silence perhaps, but there is passion underneath.

Reticences are as revealing as avowals.

One must be as clear as one's natural reticence allows one to be.

I remember manners, that's when people are scared to make other persons mad.

If a man didn't make sense, the Scotch felt it was misplaced politeness to try to keep him from knowing it. Better that he be aware of his reputation, for this would encourage reticence which goes well with stupidity.

A judicious reticence is hard to learn, but it is one of the great lessons of life.

Theres that initial reticence for some athletes to take you seriously.

Racing is a great mania to which one must sacrifice everything, without reticence, without hesitation.

A sound marriage is not based on complete frankness; it is based on a sensible reticence.

Still, there is a basic reticence about his approach that feels refreshing in today's culture of maximum exposure. Brandt did not go to great lengths to turn people into icons, nor did he presume to show their “true nature” in something so transient as a photograph. Instead, he used photography's special qualities to suggest intimate things about his subjects, things that cannot be put into words, and may not even be possible to put into pictures.

There is a probably natural and learned reticence with myself talking about my early life.

PLUNDER, v. To take the property of another without observing the decent and customary reticences of theft. To wrest the wealth of A from B and leave C lamenting a vanishing opportunity.

The art of flirtation is dying. A man and woman are either in love these days or just friends. In the realm of love, reticence and sophistication should go hand in hand, for one of the joys of life is discovery. Nowadays, instead of progressing from vous to tu, from Mister to Jim, it's 'darling' and 'come to my place' in the first hour.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.

I never miss a good chance to shut up

The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge ... falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.

Three years after my first trip to Haiti, I realized there was another emotional note that had to be reckoned with: the intense, vibrant color of these worlds. Searing light and intense color seemed somehow embedded in the cultures that I had begun working in, so utterly different from the gray-brown reticence of my New England background. Since then, I have worked predominantly in color.

Silence does not always mark wisdom.

The character [Maigret] is bound to change and develop, and I wouldn't like to claim that we are perfectly formed straight out of the box. I think it's what I'd call an 'optimistic start'. As you know, for me, no glass is anything other than half empty, so I apologise for my reticence in terms of promoting this programme.

Never complain, never explain. Resist the temptation to defend yourself or make excuses.

It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction. . . Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.

There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.

Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it.

perhaps there is something more than courtesy behind the dissembling reticence of childhood. ... Most artists dislike having their incomplete work considered and discussed and this analogy, I think, is valid. The child is incomplete, too, and is constantly experimenting as he seeks his own style of thought and feeling.

Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.

There's a reticence necessary when you consider the suffering of others. Into the space created by that reticence, you bring in those things that best help us confront ambiguity: music, painting, film, and so on.

In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely.... Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius.

She was a dark, unenduring little flower - yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.

Pardon all runners, All speechless, alien winds, All mad waters. Pardon their impulses, Their wild attitudes, Their young flights, their reticence. When a message has no clothes on How can it be spoken.

He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced.