Silence

Reading the historical wording

Franklin’s original precept

Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography, Part II · Harvard Classics 1909 text

Silence is second because Franklin wants to learn through listening. In his account, he is trying to curb his own prattling, punning and joking. The precept is about what conversation contributes, not a vow never to speak.

A contemporary adaptation

Make room to hear another person; speak when your contribution offers understanding, kindness or a needed objection.

An ordinary choice

Your friend starts describing a difficult journey. You have an excellent journey story ready, complete with a superior delay and a much worse sandwich. Your first sentence is already at the departure gate. Then you notice that your friend has not reached the reason for telling you. You let your story miss this flight.

An invented contemporary illustration.

What Silence gives

Silence gives a conversation space for an unfinished thought. A pause can reveal a question that your ready-made answer would have missed. It cannot make every speaker honest or every disagreement easy.

What becomes possible

A person can change what they are saying while they say it. When you stop competing for the next turn, you may hear uncertainty, delight or a request that was absent from the opening sentence. Both people can leave with more than the arguments they arrived with.

Silence: finding the balance

A friend is midway through explaining something that matters to them.

Listening is a contribution, but its success may require a spoken response.

If someone is being misrepresented or threatened, speaking promptly may be the attentive action. Silence is not a duty to let harm pass.

What did I hear after I stopped preparing my turn?

Silence in ordinary life

The meeting correction

Wait long enough to understand a proposal, then identify the factual problem without making the speaker complete an avoidable mistake.

The companionable joke

A light remark can help people feel at home. Franklin’s suspicion of trifling conversation need not turn every pleasant exchange into a productivity test.

Nearby virtues, different work

Curiosity

Curiosity wants to find something out; Silence makes room for an answer.

Candor

Candor supplies an honest contribution when withholding it would mislead.

Tact

Tact attends to the manner and moment of speaking; Silence notices whether this moment needs your words at all.

Silence and its counterfeits

Punishing silence

This is a counterfeit of composure and Silence: withholding all response to make a colleague anxious exerts pressure. Attentive silence remains responsive and does not use uncertainty as a weapon.

Quiet agreement

This is a counterfeit of kindness and Silence when your silence lets a false account stand. Genuine listening can end in a clear objection.

How to cultivate Silence

• Notice the sentence you are preparing while someone speaks.
• Ask one question whose answer you do not already know.
• Offer your own view when it adds something; do not make quietness a contest.

Try it today

In one ordinary conversation, let the other person finish a thought before choosing your reply. Notice whether their last sentence changes the response you wanted to give.

Questions worth returning to

• What did I hear after I stopped preparing my turn?
• Does my quietness offer room or exert pressure?
• Who needs me to speak?

Keep the practice proportionate

You owe no listening exercise to someone threatening or abusing you. Communication styles, disability, language and fatigue affect how people take turns; avoid interpreting a difference as a defective character.

Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause or skip an exercise. Putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage. These quotations retain their historical wording; the notes offer contemporary interpretations.

1. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

   Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography, Harvard Classics 1909 text · Part II, thirteen-name list, item 2 · excerpt

   Speech may benefit either others or yourself in the original rule. Its distrust of trifling conversation is preserved as historical wording, while the contemporary reading also values play and companionship.

2. my desire being to gain knowledge at the same time that I improv’d in virtue, and considering that in conversation it was obtain’d rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue,

   Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography, Harvard Classics 1909 text · Part II, reason for Silence · excerpt

   Franklin makes listening a way to learn while working on conduct. The contrast concerns whose contribution reaches you, not a demand that every conversation deliver a practical lesson.

3. 74th When Another Speaks be attentive your Self and disturb not the Audience if any hesitate in his Words help him not nor Prompt him without desired, Interrupt him not, nor Answer him till his Speech be ended

   Rules copied by George Washington; earlier sources discussed by Moncure D. Conway · George Washington’s Rules of Civility Traced to their Sources and Restored · Rule 74, Washington copy as printed by Conway · excerpt

   The rule gives an unfinished speaker room and warns against unwanted prompting. It is an older conversational prescription, not a judgment of disability or different communication styles.

4. When there are persons to be found, who form an exception to the apparent unanimity of the world on any subject, even if the world is in the right, it is always probable that dissentients have something worth hearing to say for themselves, and that truth would lose something by their silence.

   John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Chapter II · excerpt

   Mill asks what may be lost when a dissenting person is silenced even if the majority is right. This later comparison gives silence a boundary: leaving room to hear a minority is different from suppressing it.

5. We must observe, too, how far the conversation is agreeable and, as it had a reason for its beginning, so there should be a point at which to close it tactfully.

   Cicero · De Officiis, 1913 Loeb edition · Walter Miller translation · Book I, §135 · excerpt

   Cicero considers when a conversation should end as well as why it began. This classical comparison asks whether continuing to speak still serves the people present, rather than making a fixed amount of silence the goal.

6. It is a Secret known but to few, yet of no small use in the Conduct of Life, that when you fall into a Man's Conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater Inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.

   Richard Steele · The Spectator, Henry Morley edition · No. 49, 26 April 1711 · excerpt

   Steele’s narrator asks whose desire to speak is being served. The surrounding essay also describes attentive flatterers, so listening alone cannot prove sincerity; notice the speaker’s needs as well as your own advantage.

7. Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.

   William James · Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, 1899 · Talks to Teachers, VIII: The Laws of Habit · excerpt

   James asks a teacher to make room for an actual opportunity to learn instead of filling it with abstract talk. This later educational comparison values a pause that allows another person’s participation, without making necessary explanation unwelcome.

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