Not a Tolkien quote: He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.
It is time for another edition of Not a Tolkien quote and this time ’tis about silence.
It is my first quote with Bluesky that felt so off that I needed to have a closer look at it. It does come in two very similar versions:
“Who cannot understand your silence, cannot understand your words.”
“He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.” [Original by Hubbard]
It is quite common for quote sites (or individuals) to slightly alter the quote in question so it can be ‘linked’ to any name preferred.
Several quote pages have it, thanks to automated processes now readily available as images of any kind. Quotes of Idols has ‘timeless wisdom from Middle-earth’ and a large number of entries are from the films – or not from Tolkien in some other shape or form.
On my hunt to find the source for this particular find I was lucky as there was a site that actually had the bibliographical detail to go along with it: LibQuotes.(Well, it does not give full details as in page numbers etc. but some of the basics can be found.)
And from there it was a quick jump to major text databases. Hathi Trust delivered what I was searching for:
You’ll have to scroll to page 60 to find it.
Essentially, the quote is by Elbert Hubbard, an absolutely fascinating person – one of his many claims to fame is that he went down with the RMS Lusitania – who was a busy writer. You can find much of his work with Project Gutenberg or the WebArchive. One could argue that President Woodrow Wilson is responsible for him still being paid attention to – and so he’s indirectly responsible for this fake Tolkien quote!
And you can find the quote in his Note Book, too, with page 176 (left column, bottom)
So, no, this is Not a Tolkien quote but by Elbert Hubbard.
Its origin on the internet is presumably the so-called Hobbit film trilogy as earliest findings with Google are around the 2011-2012 mark. This I have noticed often – wrong attributions originated with one or the other film trilogy.
The first place using this attritbution was with Xitter:
Who cannot understand your silence, cannot understand your words.
— HANAN SARRIS (@hnnsrs) January 13, 2012
– Tolkin
And then, as so often for the last twenty+ years, something happened to push the quote – QuoteFancy published this on June 15, 2016. Let’s hope it will not spread further…
[By the way: There is also the option someone retro-translated the German translation of the original into English – and that’s more or less the variant you can see above.]
Picture credit: QuoteFancy.
