A rage for speaking.
O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast. [ Browning ]
Silence is wisdom, when speaking is folly. [ Proverb ]
Prayer is the spirit speaking truth to Truth. [ Bailey ]
A judge is a speaking law, law a silent judge. [ Cicero ]
Who ever suffered for not speaking ill of others? [ Proverb ]
The first rule for speaking well is to think well. [ Mme. de Lambert ]
Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
From hearing comes wisdom, from speaking repentance. [ Proverb ]
Every mortal is relieved by speaking of his misfortunes. [ A. Chenier ]
Speaking without thinking is shooting without taking aim. [ Spanish Proverb ]
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is a speaking picture. [ Simonides ]
He that has a great nose thinks every body is speaking of it. [ Proverb ]
The manner of your speaking is full as important as the matter. [ Chesterfield ]
Speaking words of endearment where words of comfort availed not. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
When men speak ill of you, live so that nobody will believe them. [ Burke ]
The silence often of pure innocence persuades, when speaking fails. [ William Shakespeare ]
Intellect is not speaking and logicising; it is seeing and ascertaining. [ Carlyle ]
The Sibyl, speaking with inspired mouth, sends her voice to remotest ages. [ Heraclitus ]
Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit against one's good nature. [ Montesquieu ]
A fair woman shall not only command without authority, but persuade without speaking. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
Ten Things To Do.
Do good to all.
Speak evil of none.
Hear and know the facts before judging.
Think before speaking.
Hold an angry tongue.
Be kind to the distressed.
Ask pardon for all wrongs.
Be patient toward everybody.
Stop the ears to a tale-bearer.
Disbelieve most of the ill reports concerning friends, neighbors, and people in general.
Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time. [ Not traceable ]
All wish to possess knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price. [ Juvenal ]
Style seems to depend on three things:
1. a mental attitude and character,
2. a familiarity with the best authors,
3. dexterity in the use of words, acquired by constant practice.
So we must learn to speak by speaking, as we learn to walk by walking, or to dance by dancing. [ John Stuart Blackie, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
Unconsciousness is one of the most important conditions of a good style in speaking or in writing. [ R. S. White ]
People call eloquence the facility that some have in speaking alone and for a great length of time. [ Pascal ]
Imagination has more charm in writing than in speaking: great wings must fold before entering a salon. [ Prince de Ligne ]
We should be as careful of our words as of our actions, and as far from speaking ill as from doing ill. [ Cicero ]
Every real master of speaking or writing uses his personality as he would any other serviceable material. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
The age of curiosity, like that of chivalry, is ended, properly speaking, gone. Yet perhaps only gone to sleep. [ Carlyle ]
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking. [ La Bruyère ]
Chance is but a mere name, and really nothing in itself; a conception of our minds, and only a compendious way of speaking. [ Bentley ]
Love silence rather than speech in these tragic days, when for very speaking the voice of man has fallen inarticulate to man. [ Carlyle ]
A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well. [ Montesquieu ]
The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone. [ Niebuhr ]
The manner of your speaking is full as important as the natter, as more people have ears to be tickled than understandings to judge. [ Chesterfield ]
There is a better thing than the great man who is always speaking, and that is the great man who only speaks when he has a great word to say. [ William Winter ]
Many are ambitious of saying grand things, that is, of being grandiloquent. Eloquence is speaking out - a quality few esteem, and fewer aim at. [ Hare ]
Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants - both know too much of him. [ Colton ]
That friendship only is, indeed, genuine when two friends, without speaking a word to each other, can, nevertheless, find happiness in being together. [ Georg Ebers ]
They learn to be idle, wandering about from house to house; and not only idle, but tattlers also, and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not. [ Bible ]
Cullen whispered in his last moments: I wish I had the power of writing or speaking, for then I would describe to you how pleasant a thing it is to die.
[ Dr. Derby ]
Properly speaking, we learn from those books only that we cannot judge. The author of a book that I am competent to criticise would have to learn from me. [ Goethe ]
Look in the face of the person to whom you are speaking, if you wish to know his real sentiments; for he can command his words more easily than his countenance. [ Chesterfield ]
Our happiness as human beings, generally speaking, will be found to be very much in proportion to the number of things we love, and the number of things that love us. [ Samuel Smiles ]
Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that Divine Book of Revelations, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History. [ Carlyle ]
The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him. [ Emerson ]
Every man should study conciseness in speaking; it is a sign of ignorance not to know that long speeches, though they may please the speaker, are the torture of the hearer. [ Feltham ]
Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker if it is not the truth that he is speaking? If an eloquent speaker is not speaking the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation? [ Carlyle ]
It is a good and safe rule to sojourn in every place, as if you meant to spend your life there, never omitting an opportunity of doing a kindness, or speaking a true word, or making a friend. [ Ruskin ]
It is from Cadmus, the inventor of the alphabet, this ingenious art comes to us of painting words, speaking to the eyes, and by the different form of traced figures, giving color and body to the thoughts. [ De Brebeuf ]
Generally speaking, an author's style is a faithful copy of his mind. If you would write a lucid style, let there first be light in your own mind; and if you would write a grand style, you ought to have a grand character. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
With us all is inconsistency. France, seriously speaking, is the country of wit and folly, of industry and idleness, of philosophy and fanaticism, of gaiety and pedantry, laws and their abuses, good taste and impertinence. [ Voltaire ]
After the pleasure of possessing books there is hardly anything more pleasant than that of speaking of them, and of communicating to the public the innocent richness of thought which we have acquired by the culture of letters. [ Nodier ]
To this end, nothing is to be more carefully consulted than plainness. In a lady's attire this is the single excellence: for to be what some people, call fine, is the same vice, in that case, as to be florid is in writing or speaking. [ Addison ]
Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory. Nothing can be made of nothing; he who has laid up no material can produce no combinations. [ Sir J. Reynolds ]
I have often heard it said, and I believe it to be true, that even the most eloquent man living, and however deeply impressed with the subject, could scarcely find utterance if he were to be standing up alone, and speaking only against a dead wall. [ Erskine ]
Nothing is more silly than the pleasure some people take in speaking their minds.
A man of this make will say a rude thing for the mere pleasure of saying it, when an opposite behavior, full as innocent, might have preserved his friend, or made his fortune. [ Steele ]
A man who has any relish for fine writing either discovers new beauties or receives stronger impressions from the masterly strokes of a great author every time he peruses him; besides that he naturally wears himself into the same manner of speaking and thinking. [ Addison ]
Never to speak by superlatives is a sign of a wise man; for that way of speaking wounds either truth or prudence. Exaggerations are so many prostitutions of reputation; because they discover the weakness of understanding, and the bad discerning of him that speaks. [ J. Earle ]
The failure of his mind in old age is often less the result of natural decay than of disuse. Ambition has ceased to operate; contentment brings indolence: indolence, decay of mental power, ennui, and sometimes death. Men have been known to die, literally speaking, of disease induced by intellectual vacancy. [ Sir Benjamin Brodie ]
Truth does not consist in minute accuracy of detail, but in conveying a right impression; and there are vague ways of speaking that are truer than strict facts would be. When the Psalmist said, "Rivers of water run down mine eyes, because men keep not thy law," he did not state the fact but he stated a truth deeper than fact and truer. [ Dean Alford ]
Nature, at all events, humanly speaking, is manifestly very fond of color; for she has made nothing without it. Her skies are blue; her fields, green; her waters vary with her skies; her animals, vegetables, minerals, are all colored. She paints a great many of them in apparently superfluous hues, as if to show the dullest eye how she loves color. [ Leigh Hunt ]
We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the superiority of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things! Each has what the other has not; each completes the other; they are in nothing alike; and the happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give. [ Ruskin ]
The clear conception, outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right onward, to his object - this is eloquence, or rather it is something greater and higher than all eloquence - it is action, noble, sublime, godlike action. [ Webster ]
If a man were only to deal in the world for a day, and should never have occasion to converse more with mankind, never more need their good opinion or good word, it were then no great matter (speaking as to the concernments of this world), if a man spent his reputation all at once, and ventured it at one throw; but if he be to continue in the world, and would have the advantage of conversation while he is in it, let him make use of truth and sincerity in all his words and actions; for nothing but this will last and hold out to the end. [ Tillotson ]