"Speech is silver, silence is golden" has been described as "perhaps the best known of the proverbs concerned with silence".  Similar proverbs in English include "Still waters run deep" and "Empty vessels make the most sound. In linguistics, the rebus principle is the use of existing symbols, such as pictograms, purely for their sounds regardless of their meaning, to represent new words. 

​Hieroglyphs are a writing system, and they were used to write a language called Egyptian. You can speak Egyptian, but you cannot speak hieroglyphs. The image above is a word puzzle called a rebus, where pictures stand for words that when put together make a sentence.