Why are intelligent and wise people often so quiet?

Many shallow streams flow with a deafening noise and mischievous gurgle. On the contrary deepest lakes and holes in oceans that are well over hundreds of feet deep are utterly calm and quiet.

The less the depth, the more the noise.

The more the depth, the more the calm.

Another example: Tip of an iceberg.

Small chunks of ice float on the ocean water and haven't so much hidden under water surface. Icebergs, on the contrary, owing to their massive size and weight, have more than three fourths of their bodies hidden under water and hence the expression: 'The tip of the iceberg.'

The bigger and heavier the ice, the deeper it sinks.

Smart people are something like ocean sink holes or icebergs. Their is so much mental activity going on inside them, conversation, dialogue with self, research and inner discussion in quest of answers that they naturally become quiet. Their quiet should not to be confused with loneliness, depression, melancholy, sadness, being blank or dumb.

As human mind will have it, it becomes quiet when it has to think and becomes engrossed with its thoughts. Even noisy little children become suddenly quiet when they have something interesting to do. Don't they?

That's why people suffering from tragedy, depression and anxiety are advised to go out and get busy doing stuffs like dancing, exercising, social mixing so they cannot hear their mind and the depressing thoughts within. This helps them to forget.

People who are usually very talkative, do very little thinking. All great minds, sages, philosophers, scholars, Learners etc have always been described as quiet within themselves. None of them were exactly party going chatter boxes. Buddha for example.

The louder we are, or the more we talk and listen to outside impulses, the less we hear our inner voice talk to us.

Other reasons for their quietness are:

1. They know they will not be understood or misunderstood. So they keep their mouth shut.
2. They do not find suitable company. Normal people around them have no time, patience, interest and mental calibre to converse with them or follow their reason and logic. So they keep their own company.
3. Talking like normal people drains their energy and consumes their time that they use up for thinking. Talking and small talk is just a huge waste of time for them.
4. Even when they do appear to be oddly quiet as if they don't know a thing, they will start attentively listening to something interesting going on and drawing their own thoughts. They won't talk as they don't want to give their game away. In fact, most intelligent people can be found out by how attentive they were listening to someone.
5. They don't want to show off their knowledge and expertise and invite antagonism.
6. Their minds get so noisy figuring something out inside their heads that believe me, they sometimes can't hear a word of what twenty people in same room may be animatedly chatting about. Sometimes they have to be pulled back into the same room by force.
7. Their abstract concepts, problems, questions, themes and concepts require from them a lot of abstract thinking and pondering so they could inspect each angle and find the right answers.
8. They need their minds to work with. The only way they can do that is to be with their minds which results in their becoming quiet.
9. They focus on hearing more than do mindless ordinary chatter which has no substance or use for them.
10. They really do enjoy being quiet such as normal people don't. The same stillness, solitude and quiet that unnerves and depresses normal people, driving them nuts, energises and recharges high IQ people.

So, in a nutshell, smart people can talk a lot (even to the point of exhausting themselves and others) when they have something substantial to talk about, can hear a lot when they have something to know and learn, and are usually very attentive and animated when the company and subject of discussion is to their liking.

But when not, they'll appear as dull, inattentive, lost in thoughts, odd, maybe even dumb and somewhat unmixing type. But don't let that fool you. There's a hidden meaning to their quietness just like the ocean sink hole or the tip of an iceberg.

But that's just my opinion. Thank you for reading.