Quotes About Speech

Kind words are short and easy to speak; but their echoes are truly endless

Before you speak ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

Being HUMBLE is more important than being WISE because GOD doesn't need a PROUD mouth that SPEAKS much, but be KIND heart that LISTENS!

Many times in life I have regretted the things I have said without thinking. But I have never regretted the things I've said nearly as much as the words I left unspoken.

In Phthia, the consonants were harder than elsewhere, and the vowels wider. It had sounded ugly to me, until I heard Achilles speak.

Her mouth tightens. "Have you no more memories?" I am made of memories. "Speak, then.

I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.

She will not, she tells herself, be the first to speak. Let him decide what should be said, since he is so skilled with words, since he is so fêted and celebrated for his pretty speeches. She will keep her counsel. He is the one who has caused this problem, this breach in their marriage: He can be the one to address it.

The words fly out of her mouth, like hornets, words she didn't even know she knew, words that dart and crackle and maim, words that twist and mangle her tongue.

A bad man is as much pleased as a good man is distressed to speak ill of others.

A wound inflicted by arrows heals, a wood cut down by an axe grows, but harsh words are hateful?a wound inflicted by them does not heal. Arrows of different sorts can be extracted from the body, but a word-dart cannot be drawn out, for it is seated in the heart.

To abstain from speaking is regarded as very difficult. It is not possible to say much that is valuable and striking.*

I look out on my language, two days later A short absence is enough for Aeschylus to open the door to peace a short speech is enough for Antonio to incite war A hand of a woman in my hand is enough to embrace my freedom and for the ebb and flow to begin anew in my body (I See my Ghost Coming from a Distance)

Conversation was strictly limited to functional needs and 'scurrilous and shameful words' and laughter were altogether prohibited, regulations especially relevant to a recurring theme in the Rule: the need to avoid displays of anger, malice, or grumbling, or reminiscences about past sexual conquests. 'Every idle word is known to generate sin.

We speak with our lips to explain, with our throats to convince.

Journalism equals intellectual male prostitution of speech and writing

Swollen in head, weak in legs, sharp in tongue but empty in belly. (On intellectuals)

La palabra es libertad.

There's an old Irish saying: Many a time a man's mouth broke his nose.

When he talked, there was a sort of mushy sound to his pronunciation that was charming because one sensed that it betrayed not so much an impediment in his speech as a quality of his soul, a sort of vestige of early childhood innocence that he had never lost. Each consonant he could not pronounce appeared to be another instance of a hardness of which he was incapable.

And what little she allowed herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained timidity paralysed her tendency to freedom and audacity of speech.

When he spoke, his words came with a confusion which was delightful to hear because one felt that it indicated not so much a defect in his speech as a quality of his soul, as it were a survival from the age of innocence which he had never wholly outgrown.

And yet one did not find in the speech of Bergotte a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers, often modified in the written phrase the appearance of its words. This was doubtless because that light issues from so profound a depth that its rays do not penetrate to our spoken words in the hours in which, thrown open to others by the act of conversation, we are to a certain extent closed against ourselves.