It takes two years to learn to speak and sixty to learn to keep quiet.
- Topic: Communication, Listening
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Ernest Hemingway
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
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Where words fail, music speaks.
After all, the only proper intoxication is conversation.
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg crackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.
Teach your child to hold his tongue; he'll learn fast enough to speak.
Understanding a question is half an answer.
The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.
Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.