Motivational Quotes

Speech

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.

- Chuang-tzu

Best Quotes about Speech

Readiness of speech is often inability to hold the tongue.

Jean Baptiste Rousseau

Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man. [Colossians 4:6]

Bible

What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

Hesse, Hermann

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.

Chuang-tzu

For mankind, speech with a capital S is especially meaningful and committing, more than the content communicated. The outcry of the newborn and the sound of the bells are fraught with mystery more than the baby's woeful face or the venerable tower.

Goodman, Paul

Speech is always bolder than action.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

Talk is over-rated as a means of settling disputes.

Cruise, Tom

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

Rorty, Richard

11.

When you have spoken the word, it reigns over you. When it is unspoken you reign over it.

Proverb, Arabian

12.

Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.

Arendt, Hannah

13.

Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

Paz, Octavio

14.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

Bacon, Francis

15.

Speech is the mirror of the mind. (Imago Animi Sermo Est)

Seneca

16.

People resent articulacy, as if articulacy were a form of vice.

Raphael, Frederic

17.

It's a damn shame we have this immediate ticking off in the mind about how people sound. On the other hand, how many people really want to be operated upon by a surgeon who talks broad cockney?

Aitkins, Eileen

18.

Tears at times have all the weight of speech.

Ovid

19.

Things are often spoke and seldom meant.

William Shakespeare

20.

Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he.

Publilius Syrus

21.

Though thou speak'st truth, methink thou speak'st not well.

William Shakespeare

22.

Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.

Maxims of Ptahhotep

23.

Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.

Sir Francis Bacon

24.

Talkers are no good doers; be assur'd we come to use our hands and not our tongues.

William Shakespeare

25.

Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

Noonan, Peggy

26.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

27.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

28.

Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.

Wilder, Thornton

29.

The mind is a wonderful thing. It starts working the minute you're born and never stops working until you get up to speak in public.

Ball, Patricia Ann

30.

I do know of these that... only are reputed wise for saying nothing.

William Shakespeare

31.

Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.

Sophocles

32.

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so he is.

Syrus, Publilius

33.

All speech is vain and empty unless it be accompanied by action.

Demosthenes

34.

I do not speak to thee in drink but in tears, not in pleasure but in passion, not in words only, but in woes also.

William Shakespeare

35.

Sweet Benjamin, since thou art young, and hast not yet the use of tongue, make it thy slave, while thou art free; Imprison it, lest it do thee.

Hoskins, John

36.

Do not fight verbosity with words: speech is given to all, intelligence to few.

Moralia

37.

Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact -- it is silence which isolates.

Mann, Thomas

38.

In a free state there should be freedom of speech and thought.

Tiberius

39.

How absolute the knave is! we must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.

William Shakespeare

40.

I've decided to discontinue my long talks. It's because of my throat. Someone threatened to cut it.

41.

Where the speech is corrupted, the mind is also.

Seneca

42.

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

Gore Vidal

43.

Why doesn't the fellow who says, I'm no speechmaker let it go at that instead of giving a demonstration?

Hubbard, Kin

44.

The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.

Connolly, Cyril

45.

The stroke of the whip maketh marks in the flesh: but the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones. Many have fallen by the edge of the sword: but not so many as have fallen by the tongue. [Ecclesiasticus 28:17 --18]

Bible

46.

Weighest thy words before thou givest them breath.

William Shakespeare

47.

If you don't want to read it, see it or hear it, don't say it.

48.

Bigotry and intolerance, silenced by argument, endeavors to silence by persecution, in old days by fire and sword, in modern days by the tongue.

Simmons, Charles

49.

It's better to keep your mouth shut and give the impression that you're stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.

Belson, Rami