Quotes About Eloquence

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly & desperately drunk with a certain belief; it agitates & tears him, & almost bereaves him of the power of articulation.

Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.

He bantered us, challenged us, electrified us . . . At times his eloquence held us silent as images and some witty turn, some humorous phrase brought roars of applause. At times we cheered almost every sentence, like delegates at a political convention, At other moments we rose in our seats and yelled. There was something hypnotic in his rhythm and phrasing. His power over his auditors was absolute. {Garland's thoughts on the great Robert Ingersoll }

That silence is one of the great arts of conversation is allowed by Cicero himself, who says, there is not only an art, but even an eloquence in it.

I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior 'public service'.

President Obama wrote his own speeches. In a visit to a mosque in Baltimore he pitted his eloquence against the anti-Muslim demagoguery of Donald Trump, running for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential election. The image Obama evoked was the parable of the Good Samaritan, but indirectly, and look how he did it in a single phrase, the moral thought fused by a gentle alliteration: "None of us can be silent. We can't be bystanders to bigotry.

Horace Greeley's conversation inevitably becomes a speech.

The day they brought him forth to die they feared he might incite the crowd (the man was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask in which he could not speak. That is how they burned him. That is how he died, without a word, in front of everyone.

Repeating yourself is brave. Repeating yourself calls attention to what you are saying.

The difficulty is believing what we are told, and my grandmother said that a good prayer depends on the audience. It's all in the clutter of words, this eloquence, the lives before and after transformed into fingerprints, notes of music, the accessories of forgotten civilizations.

I have never heard a more eloquent silence.

take consolation from the fact that the brighter the individual, the more he or she detests small talk.

To be quite honest with you, I haven't known many Christians as articulate as you.

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.

We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.

When the evening was over, Anne could not be amused…nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.

Una persona che sa scrivere una lunga lettera con facilità non può scrivere male.

I abhor every common-place phrase by which wit is intended

My idea of good company... is the company of clever, well informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.

My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.

Unlike his father, Churchill was not a natural speaker.

But like a born actor who only really wants to direct, Gingrich has always been unsatisfied with what he's brilliant at. He can't still his hunger to deliver grand pronouncements on life, liberalism, conservatism, religion and whatever else swims into his consciousness.

If you're sort of interested in politics but sort of upset about contemporary politics, it's kind of wonderful to read about periods who were very eloquent and admirable - generally. People are articulating ideas you can sympathize with or understand both sides of. Or at least feel like one side is saying the right things.