Quotes About Communication

Diplomacy is the art of knowing what not to say.

Every reader of your program should understand what your functions compute without having to read the function itself. A multi-function program should also come with a purpose statement. Indeed, good programmers write two purpose statements: one for the reader who may have to modify the code and another one for the person who wishes to use the program but not read it.

Betsy. The great war is on but I hope ours is over. Please come home. Joe.

I'm walking this over to you, I'm talking to you, which means this is important.

Te quiero, Donna —al ver que ella no contestaba, controló el estremecimiento de pánico y siguió hablando con su mejor voz de mando—. Y será mejor que tú también me quieras. Es una orden.

As socially insecure people tend to do, he responds by apologizing.

Somehow, by holding hands you can carry on a conversation without talking.

it is an achievement, too: to be wholly understood by one person. [Édouard Manet]

It is so difficult to endow our words with meaning, to talk sense to each other.

Stuart must have sensed my despair from the way I began lightly banging my forehead on the table.

Welsh is an actual, currently used language and our next-door neighbors Angela and Gaenor spoke it. It sounds like Wizard.

Did you ever meet a mother that complained that her child phoned her too often? Me neither.

I watch and listen to movies today and am shocked by the way actors deliver their lines. Everybody mumbles now and I don't understand why.

To write is, moreover, to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power according to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time.

One thing must be understood : I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Where he is, only being speaks—which means that language doesn't speak any more, but is.

On eût dit qu'en parlant un langage dont le caractère enfantin ne permettait pas qu'on le tînt pour un langage, elle donnait aux mots insignifiants l'aspect de mots incompréhensibles. Elle ne disait rien, mais ne rien dire était pour elle un mode d'expression trop significatif, au-dessous duquel elle réussissait à moins dire encore.

Escribir será, en el libro, volverse legible para todos y, para sí mismo, indescifrable?

Silence your dog, captain!

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together ... Speech is too often ... the act of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal ... Speech is of Time, silence is of Eternity ... It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another ...

Never for an instant does God cease to speak; but no one thinks of opening the doors. And yet, with a little watchfulness, it were not difficult to hear the word that God must speak concerning our every act.

it is that such of us as have loved deeply have learnt many secrets that are unknown to others; for thousands and thousands of things quiver in silence on the lips of true friendship and love, that are not to be found in the silence of other lips, to which friendship and love are unknown. …