Vol. 06 · Misquoted ·Book ·251 of 348
"Speech is silver, silence is golden."
They never said that.
What people say
"Speech is silver, silence is golden."
What was actually said
"Speech is silvern, silence is golden." Thomas Carlyle — Sartor Resartus III.iii (1831); Thomas Carlyle translating a "Swiss inscription"
Why it stuck
Carlyle's English translation of the Swiss-German saying used the archaic "silvern" not "silver." The -n fell off in 20th-century quotation.
The Swiss original ("Reden ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden") appears in Johann Paul Friedrich Richter and earlier Arabic sources.
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