The Wisdom of Silence

 The Wisdom of Silence

March 17,2025

Proverbs 17:27-28 (NASB95) 

27 He who restrains his words has knowledge, And he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. 28 Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is considered wise; When he closes his lips, he is considered prudent.

Today is St. Patrick’s day, so maybe something a little lighter to consider; the wisdom of silence. Proverbs speaks much about wisdom and Proverbs 17 talks about the wisdom of keeping silent. A more American version of this proverb is as follows:

Better to keep quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

This is sometimes attributed to Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln, but there is no proof that either one actually said it. However, having grown up near Hannibal and New Salem, it is easy to imagine that either or both could have said it. It was the common ethos of that region that speaking was reserved for those rare occasions when you actually had something important to say. The way that my father put it was, “children should be seen and not heard.” This maxim was strictly enforced with a stern glare if you spoke up out of turn. “Silence is golden”, is another common expression that I grew up with, and we were blessed with long stretches of silence over the rolling plains, where actual people were few and far between. I had one Bible teacher that said he practiced preaching by speaking to the cows. I suppose I could have done that, but that seemed silly. I probably talked more to my dog and cats because I could depend upon them to listen. The dog was especially attentive, but of course the cats would just wander off and take a nap when they got bored.

So how does this relate to St. Patrick’s day, you might ask. Well it doesn’t really, though when I did first meet some Irishmen, the gift of blarney was something quite strange to me. I was amazed to discover that there are actually speak when they have nothing of importance to say! Not that this is a specifically Irish trait, but it does seem to be more common among them that it was among the German and English midwesterners that I grew up with. In fact, it was not an Irishman at all that first tried to teach me to speak more freely. One of the girls among my hippy friends in college was Swedish and she loved to try to get me to participate in “stream of conscienceless” speaking. It was very strange to me, to say the least.

The end of the matter is this, there is much wisdom in the Proverbs, so I will stick with King Solomon and the other writers of the Proverbs, and endeavor to speak with wisdom when it is appropriate and keep silent otherwise. This is the sentiment of Proverbs 15, so I will close with that.

Proverbs 15:2 (NASB95)

2 Thetongue of the wise makes knowledge acceptable, But the mouth of fools spouts folly.