Quotes About Communication

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue.

In good writing, words become one with things.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

Language is the archives of history…. Language is fossil poetry.

We die of words. We are hanged, drawn and quartered by dictionaries. We walk in the vale of shadows. It is an age of hobgoblins.

There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much.

Almost all people descend to meet.

Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.

Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.

An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy.... One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.

If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man. Always the seer is a sayer.

Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.

The mind will quote whether the tongue does or not.

Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls and to-tomorrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

Whatever we think and say is wonderfully better for our spirits and trust in another mouth.

It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol, and an audience is electrified.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face.

Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.