Motivational Quotes

Speech

The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency.

- Walter Bagehot

Best Quotes about Speech

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

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

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

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

Men of few words are the best men.

William Shakespeare

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

Hubbard, Kin

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

In anger we should refrain both from speech and action.

Pythagoras

Readiness of speech is often inability to hold the tongue.

Jean Baptiste Rousseau

10.

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

Moralia

11.

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

12.

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

Chuang-tzu

13.

Thought is the fountain of speech.

Chrysippus

14.

Speech has been given to man to disguise his thoughts.

Talleyrand, Charles Maurice De

15.

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

William Shakespeare

16.

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

17.

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

Thomas Carlyle

18.

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

Demosthenes

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Publilius Syrus

22.

Where the speech is corrupted, the mind is also.

Seneca

23.

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

Cruise, Tom

24.

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

Cioran, E. M.

25.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

26.

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

27.

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

Seneca

28.

Weighest thy words before thou givest them breath.

William Shakespeare

29.

Tears at times have all the weight of speech.

Ovid

30.

Never try to impress people with the profundity of your thought by the obscurity of your language. Whatever has been thoroughly thought through can be stated simply.

31.

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

Mark Twain

32.

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

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Proverb, Arabian

37.

Speech is always bolder than action.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

38.

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

Stevenson, Robert Louis

39.

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

40.

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

Tiberius

41.

A long tongue shortens life.

42.

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

Arendt, Hannah

43.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

44.

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

45.

I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

46.

Better pointed bullets than pointed speeches.

Bismarck, Otto Von

47.

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

Noonan, Peggy

48.

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

49.

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

Cato The Elder

50.

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