Quotes
Quotes about Speech
Silence sweeter is than speech.
Men are polished, through act and speech,
Each by each,
As pebbles are smoothed on the rolling beach.
Gather a shell from the strewn beach
And listen at its lips:they sigh
The same desire and mystery,
The echo of the whole sea's speech.
I send thee a shell from the ocean-beach;
But listen thou well, for my shell hath speech.
Hold to thine ear
And plain thou'lt hear
Tales of ships.
His speech is a burning fire.
Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colorless photography of a printed record.
Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he.
It is a difficult task, O citizens, to make speeches to the belly, which has no ears.
Lamachus chid a captain for a fault; and when he had said he would do so no more, "Sir," said he, "in war there is no room for a second miscarriage." Said one to Iphicrates, "What are ye afraid of?" "Of all speeches," said he, "none is so dishonourable for a general as ‘I should not have thought of it.'"
Phocion compared the speeches of Leosthenes to cypress-trees. "They are tall," said he, "and comely, but bear no fruit."
When Eudæmonidas heard a philosopher arguing that only a wise man can be a good general, "This is a wonderful speech," said he; "but he that saith it never heard the sound of trumpets."
Solon used to say that speech was the image of actions;... that laws were like cobwebs,--for that if any trifling or powerless thing fell into them, they held it fast; while if it were something weightier, it broke through them and was off.
Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.
We have such hope, we use great plainness of speech.
Though I be rude in speech.
Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt.
Free soil, free men, free speech, Frémont.
The reality of literature, as opposed to its appearance in written of printed records, is the organization of speech sounds, and this makes literature a temporal art, a twin of music.
..the people of Tudor England, like the modern Irish, were great talkers. One imagines their speech as rapid, bubbling, both earthily exact and carelessly malapropistic. It was perhaps a McLuhanesque medium, itself its own message and it exhibited the essential function of language - to maintain social contact in the dark.... Speech, when you come to think of it, is not a very exact medium: it is full of stumblings and apologies for not finding the right word; it has to be helped out with animal grunts and the gestures which, one is convinced, represent man's primal mode of communication. Take speech as a flickering auditory candle, and the mere act of maintaining its light becomes enough. Tales, gossip, riddles, word-play pass the time in the dark, and out of these - not out of the need to recount facts or state a case - springs literature.
There is probably no greater happiness in this world than that derived from writing, in a void, for pure pleasure - to see whether places and people, speech and action, can be fixed on paper and then, like a lesser divine creation, rise from that paper and live
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
