Motivational Quotes

Speech

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

- Thomas Carlyle

Best Quotes about Speech

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

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

Raphael, Frederic

The basic rule of human nature is that powerful people speak slowly and subservient people quickly --because if they don't speak fast nobody will listen to them.

Caine, Michael

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

Cioran, E. M.

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

Whitehead, Alfred North

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

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

Moralia

Listening to someone talk isn't at all like listening to their words played over on a machine. What you hear when you have a face before you is never what you hear when you have before you a winding tape.

Fallaci, Oriana

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

William Shakespeare

10.

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

Barthes, Roland

11.

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

12.

Bore: one who has the power of speech but not the capacity for conversation.

Benjamin Disraeli

13.

Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.

Sir Francis Bacon

14.

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

15.

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

Arendt, Hannah

16.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

Bacon, Francis

17.

Speech is always bolder than action.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

18.

Speech is the gift of all, but the thought of few.

Cato The Elder

19.

Tears at times have all the weight of speech.

Ovid

20.

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

Proverb, Arabian

21.

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

Stevenson, Robert Louis

22.

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

Hesse, Hermann

23.

Speech has been given to man to disguise his thoughts.

Talleyrand, Charles Maurice De

24.

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

Mann, Thomas

25.

Men of few words are the best men.

William Shakespeare

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

From my earliest days I have enjoyed an attractive impediment in my speech. I have never permitted the use of the word stammer. I can't say it myself.

Campbell, Patrick

30.

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

31.

Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, --for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it -- not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.

Melville, Herman

32.

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

33.

Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen.

Bob Marley

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.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Cruise, Tom

38.

Speeches that are measured by the hour will die with the hour.

Jefferson, Thomas

39.

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

Syrus, Publilius

40.

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

Hubbard, Kin

41.

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

Chuang-tzu

42.

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

43.

Where the speech is corrupted, the mind is also.

Seneca

44.

If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.

W. Somerset Maugham

45.

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

46.

Weighest thy words before thou givest them breath.

William Shakespeare

47.

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

Sophocles

48.

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

Noonan, Peggy

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

50.

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