Zeno Quote on Silence: The Two Ears and One Mouth

Quote

"We have two ears and one mouth, to listen twice as much as we speak: the silence is the discipline of the wise, and the person who has learned to listen has learned the beginning of the wisdom." — Zeno of Citium, as reported in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book VII

Author

Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BCE) was the founder of Stoicism, born in Cyprus and active in Athens from around 300 BCE. The saying on the two ears and the one mouth is one of the most quoted of the ancient maxims.

Source

The quotation is preserved in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book VII, in the account of Zeno's teaching. It is a report of the tradition's maxims rather than a verbatim quotation from a surviving work.

Context

The saying belongs to the Stoic discipline of speech, and it is one of the most famous of the ancient maxims. The Stoics treated the speech as one of the domains of the discipline: the words are the expression of the judgment, and the discipline of the speech is the discipline of the judgment. The saying on the two ears and the one mouth is the simplest form of the discipline: the listening is the acquisition, the speaking is the expenditure, and the proportion of the nature — two to one — is the proportion of the wisdom.

Meaning

The quotation states the Stoic discipline of speech with complete clarity. "We have two ears and one mouth" — the given: the proportion of the nature — two organs of the listening, one organ of the speech. "To listen twice as much as we speak" — the intention: the proportion is not the accident but the intention — the nature has made us for the listening, and the listening is the acquisition. "The silence is the discipline of the wise" — the discipline: the silence — the restraint of the speech, the refusal of the idle word — is the discipline of the wise. "The person who has learned to listen has learned the beginning of the wisdom" — the beginning: the wisdom begins in the listening — the attention to the other, the reception of the world — and the person who has learned the listening has learned the beginning. The quotation is the Stoic discipline of the speech in its simplest form, and it grounds the practice of prosoche in the Stoic wisdom tradition.

Related Wisdom

The quotation belongs to the Stoic discipline of silence and the philosophy of the speech. Its account of the two ears and the one mouth connects to the wider wisdom tradition's teaching on the listening and the speech, and it grounds the practice of the attention in the Stoic wisdom tradition.