Top 36 Reticence Quotes & Sayings

It is clear that the Trump administration doesn't have the same reticence that the Obama administration did in terms of putting more boots on the ground, especially conventional troops, as opposed to special operations troops.

Clumsiness attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.

There's that initial reticence for some athletes to take you seriously.

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

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.

It's a hard thing to examine and difficult to speak for other writers, but when I look at my own writing there is often too much reticence. And that's a flaw I have as a person as well. I'm too reticent. I'm non-confrontational to a fault. And I'm risk-averse, which probably shows in my sentences. The aversion to long lines, the tendency to strip things back and be spare. My writing is an act of erasure that's tied up with my personality. I can easily produce a ninety thousand word chunk of writing and then cut back and back until I've only got ten thousand words. Or nothing.

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

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

You do need more revenues, and you do need to cut expenses. But you also don't want to go in a direction whereby increasing taxes creates a reticence to create new jobs. You don't want to increase taxes on work. You don't want to increase taxes on investment and the creation of wealth.

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

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.

Nowadays, people often ask me when I came out, generalising from the experience of many young people who announce themselves to the world on a particular afternoon. But I did not divorce my reticence in a single sharp break. Rather, I seeped out like a spreading wine stain.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After Sept. 11, there was a reticence and worrying about films that touched on war, and even more on terrorism.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I always, by an involuntary act of defensiveness, return to my everyday self: so, I find, have I withdrawn from writing about experiences which have most closely concerned and disturbed me. I have been deflected by my own reticence.

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.

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

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

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.

Often confused with shyness, introversion does not imply social reticence or discomfort. Rather than being averse to social engagement, introverts become overwhelmed by too much of it, which explains why the introvert is ready to leave a party after an hour and the extravert gains steam as the night goes on.

As anyone who has covered the company for any length of time knows, Yahoo's record on major decision-making has been akin to a hippie commune - a lot of wrangling internally in a culture where everyone seems to have a voice and a reticence to push the button to launch.

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.

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.

It is not a life at all. It is a reticence, in three volumes.

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.