Motivational Quotes

Speech

Men of few words are the best men.

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Speech

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Thought is the fountain of speech.

Chrysippus

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

Moralia

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

What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.

Hansell B. Duckett

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Publilius Syrus

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

10.

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

11.

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

Thomas Carlyle

12.

Weighest thy words before thou givest them breath.

William Shakespeare

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

Cioran, E. M.

18.

Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.

Sir Francis Bacon

19.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

20.

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

21.

Tears at times have all the weight of speech.

Ovid

22.

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

William Shakespeare

23.

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

24.

In anger we should refrain both from speech and action.

Pythagoras

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

27.

Better pointed bullets than pointed speeches.

Bismarck, Otto Von

28.

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

Cato The Elder

29.

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

Stevenson, Robert Louis

30.

Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen.

Bob Marley

31.

Where the speech is corrupted, the mind is also.

Seneca

32.

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

Walter Bagehot

33.

Speech is always bolder than action.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

34.

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

35.

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

Noonan, Peggy

36.

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

37.

Readiness of speech is often inability to hold the tongue.

Jean Baptiste Rousseau

38.

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

Demosthenes

39.

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

40.

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

Arendt, Hannah

41.

A long tongue shortens life.

42.

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

43.

Speech has been given to man to disguise his thoughts.

Talleyrand, Charles Maurice De

44.

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

45.

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

Syrus, Publilius

46.

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

Hesse, Hermann

47.

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

Raphael, Frederic

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

William Shakespeare