Motivational Quotes

Speech

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Speech

Tears at times have all the weight of speech.

Ovid

Weighest thy words before thou givest them breath.

William Shakespeare

We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

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

Hubbard, Kin

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

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

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.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

Bacon, Francis

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.

Speech has been given to man to disguise his thoughts.

Talleyrand, Charles Maurice De

12.

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

Sophocles

13.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

14.

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

William Shakespeare

15.

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

Publilius Syrus

16.

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

17.

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.

Sir William Osler

18.

Be it art or hap, he hath spoken true.

William Shakespeare

19.

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

20.

Speech is always bolder than action.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

21.

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

Cioran, E. M.

22.

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

23.

Readiness of speech is often inability to hold the tongue.

Jean Baptiste Rousseau

24.

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.

25.

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

Walter Bagehot

26.

Things are often spoke and seldom meant.

William Shakespeare

27.

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

28.

A talk is like a woman's dress. Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting.

29.

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

Cato The Elder

30.

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

31.

Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen.

Bob Marley

32.

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

Proverb, Arabian

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Be check'd for silence, but never tax'd for speech.

William Shakespeare

36.

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

Arendt, Hannah

37.

Where the speech is corrupted, the mind is also.

Seneca

38.

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

Syrus, Publilius

39.

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

40.

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

Demosthenes

41.

Better pointed bullets than pointed speeches.

Bismarck, Otto Von

42.

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

Thomas Carlyle

43.

Men of few words are the best men.

William Shakespeare

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Cruise, Tom

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Thought is the fountain of speech.

Chrysippus