Quotes About Communication

We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

I will never be able to do or be everything you want, nor vice versa, but I'd like to think we can be the sort of people who will dare to tell each other who we really are. The alternative is silence and lies, which are the real enemies of love.

One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other - not with one person wanting a fling and the other real love...

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided.

Seeing through people is so easy, and it gets you nowhere,' remarked Elias Canetti, suggesting how effortlessly and yet how uselessly we can find fault with others.

Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key—a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they've been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place. The

We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it's patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with—and forgive—the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within.

it seems impossible to talk of love and letting live, and if we are left to live, we are not usually loved.

No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.

Public life is debased because it's only the nice people who are worried about imposing their views on others.

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

Art builds up self-knowledge, and is an excellent way of communicating the resulting fruit to other people.

Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back.

We can be laughed into silence for attempting to speak in praise of phenomena which we lack the right words to describe. We may censor ourselves before others have the chance to do so. We may not even notice that we have extinguished our own curiosity, just as we may forget we had something to say until we find someone who is willing to hear it.

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

You can tell a paragraph is slipping out of control when there's a runaway use of the word 'hence.

We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.

Wanting to sound like other people has its temptations. There are inherited habits of speech guaranteed to make us sound authoritative, intelligent, worldly, appropriately grateful, or deeply moved.

A fundamental truth, is that there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing. People are only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deeper selves or don't dare or know how to communicate them to others. 

The sulker is a complicated creature, giving off messages of deep ambivalence, crying out for help and attention, while at the same time rejecting it should it be offered, wanting to be understood without needing to speak.

The accusations we make of our lovers make no particular sense. We would utter such unfair things to no one else on earth. But our wild charges are a peculiar proof of intimacy and trust, a symptom of love itself—and in their own way a perverted manifestation of commitment. Whereas we can say something sensible and polite to any stranger, it is only in the presence of the lover we wholeheartedly believe in that can we dare to be extravagantly and boundlessly unreasonable. A