Audi Vide Tace: Hear, See, Be Silent
Audi, vide, tace means “hear, see, be silent.” Three Latin imperatives, one to a verb: audi from audire, to hear; vide from videre, to see; tace from tacere, to be silent — the root that also gives English tacit and taciturn.
It is among the best known Masonic mottoes, carried on the armorial bearings of the United Grand Lodge of England and found on eighteenth-century Masonic jewels, glassware and bookplates. But it did not begin in a lodge, and the older version of the line tells you more about what it is actually asking.
The proverb underneath
The motto is a shortened form of a medieval Latin proverb that circulated widely in Europe:
Audi, vide, tace, si vis vivere in pace.
Hear, see, be silent, if you would live in peace.
That completion changes the colour of the thing entirely. On its own, “hear, see, be silent” sounds like an oath of secrecy. With the second half attached, it is plain practical wisdom of a kind found in proverb collections across medieval Europe — take in what is around you, and do not repeat all of it, because the man who repeats everything makes enemies.
It rhymes in Latin (tace / pace), which is why it travelled. Proverbs survive by being easy to say.
Audi Vide Tace — Square & Compasses Tee
Three words of hard-won sense, set in heavy type with the square and compasses.
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What the discipline actually asks
Read carefully, the motto is not an instruction to know nothing or say nothing. Two thirds of it command attention. You are told to hear and to see — to take the world in fully — and only then told what to do with what you have gathered.
That ordering matters. A man who hears nothing and sees nothing has no discretion to exercise; he is merely ignorant. The motto describes someone who is unusually well informed and nonetheless does not trade on it. Discretion without knowledge is not a virtue, just a vacancy.
In a fraternal context there is a narrower application: the private business of a lodge, the ballot on a candidate, a brother’s circumstances. But the proverb was in general circulation long before it was engraved on a jewel, and the general reading is the honest one.
Silence as a rule, not a mood
Orders that take vows seriously tend to legislate silence, and the Knights Templar were no exception. Their Rule — shaped under the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, as how Saint Bernard shaped the Rule describes — treated speech as something to be governed rather than left to taste.
Templars ate in silence while scripture was read aloud. Idle talk and boasting were disciplinary matters; the Rule warns explicitly against loose speech, and how the Order punished its own sets out what the Order did about brothers who broke its provisions. Chapter meetings were held behind closed doors, and what passed in them stayed there.
The parallel is close enough to be worth stating, but so is the difference in outcome, because it is instructive.
When silence becomes a liability
Here is the uncomfortable half of the lesson, and the Templars paid for it.
When Philip IV’s officers arrested the Order across France on Friday 13 October 1307, the secrecy of Templar chapter meetings became the prosecution’s most useful asset. Nobody outside the Order could say what happened in them — so the charges could allege anything, and the Order’s own discipline meant it had built no public record to contradict them. the trial of the Templars covers how the interrogations proceeded from there.
The lesson is not that discretion is a mistake. It is that silence protects an institution only while that institution is unthreatened, and an organisation that explains nothing about itself has no credit to draw on when it is attacked. Both of the Templars’ modern admirers and the fraternities that borrowed their imagery have had occasion to learn this.
The company it keeps
Latin mottoes survive because they compress. The Templars’ own phrases work the same way — Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam, covered in Non Nobis Domine, and In hoc signo vinces, covered in In Hoc Signo Vinces. Each is short enough to say in unison, rhythmic enough to remember, and general enough to apply for eight hundred years without revision.
Audi, vide, tace belongs to that family. Three verbs, three syllables of instruction, no qualification. You could carve it on a lintel in 1500 or print it on a shirt in 2026 and it would ask the same thing.
The three words, one at a time
Each verb is a second-person singular imperative — the form you use when speaking directly to one person, not to a crowd. That grammatical detail is doing quiet work: the motto addresses you, individually, and cannot be fulfilled by a committee.
Audi gives English audible, audience and audit — and audit is the revealing one, since an auditor was originally someone who heard accounts read aloud. Vide survives in video, in evident, and in the scholar’s instruction vide supra, “see above.” Tace is the rarest in English but the most precise: tacit consent is agreement that was never spoken, and a taciturn man is not mute but sparing.
So the imperative is not “say nothing.” Tacere is the silence of a man who could speak and chooses not to, which is the only kind worth commanding.
Wearing it
A motto about restraint should not be shouted. Our Audi Vide Tace tee sets the three words beneath the square and compasses in a single ink, with an aged print texture — the look of something that has been in a pocket for a while rather than something just bought.
Most mottoes tell you to be braver, stronger, more certain. This one tells you to pay attention and keep your mouth shut, which is both rarer advice and, on most days, better.
Frequently asked questions
What does Audi Vide Tace mean?
It is Latin for ‘hear, see, be silent’ — three imperatives, from audire (to hear), videre (to see) and tacere (to be silent).
Where does the motto Audi Vide Tace come from?
It is a shortened form of the medieval Latin proverb ‘Audi, vide, tace, si vis vivere in pace’ — hear, see, be silent, if you would live in peace. It was in general European circulation before Masonic use.
Is Audi Vide Tace a Masonic motto?
Yes, it is among the best known. It is carried on the armorial bearings of the United Grand Lodge of England and appears on eighteenth-century Masonic jewels and glassware, though the phrase itself is older than the fraternity.
Does Audi Vide Tace mean keeping secrets?
Not exactly. Two of its three commands tell you to take the world in — hear and see. It describes a well-informed person who exercises discretion, not someone who knows or says nothing.
How is Audi Vide Tace pronounced?
In the usual ecclesiastical Latin: OW-dee VEE-day TAH-chay. In classical reconstructed pronunciation the final word is closer to TAH-kay.