Quotes about Eloquence

Polyhymnia Greek Muse of Eloquence

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense. Joseph Conrad 

Speech is one symptom of affection; and silence one; the perfect communication is heard of none. Emily Dickinson  

Everything that steel achieves in war can be won in politics by eloquence. Demetrius

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. Dostoevsky 

He that has no silver in his purse should have silver on his tongue. Thomas Fuller 

There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth of indignation. Victor Hugo

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first. Emerson 

True eloquence consists in saying all that should be said, and that only. LA Rochefoucauld 

Promise is most given when the least is said. George Chapman 

Today it is neither the classroom nor the classics which are the models of eloquence, but the ad agencies. Marshall McLuhan 

Good communication is stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after. Anne Morrow Lindbergh 

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictious word, preserves contact; it is silence which isolates. Thomas Mann

Yes and no are soon said, but give much to think over. Baltasar Gracian 

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth. Pascal

The articulate voice is more distracting than mere noise. Seneca 

It is an impertinent and unreasonable fault in conversation for one man to take up all the discourse. Richard Steele 

Nothing is often a good thing to say, and always a clever thing to say. Will Durant 

If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried onto success.  Confucius 

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying. G. K. Chesterton 

Eloquence; it requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true. Pascal

Brevity is very good, when we are or are not understood.  Samuel Butler 

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves. John Locke 

I see that everywhere among the race of men, it is the tongue that wins and not the deed. Sophocles 

The voice is a second face. Gerard Bauer 

Whenever I have talked to anyone at too great length, I am like a man who has drunk too much, and ashamed, doesn’t know where to put himself. Jules Renard 

Clarity is the politeness of the man of letters. Jules Renard 

The stillest tongue can be the truest friend. Euripides 

Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one. George Santayana

Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise; that which is common to you, me, and everybody. Thomas Ernest Hulme  

That is the happiest conversation where there is no competition, no vanity, but a calm quiet interchange of sentiments. Samuel Johnson 

No one would talk much in society, if he only knew how often he misunderstands others. Goethe 

I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence. Jean-Paul Sartre 

Words have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world’s realities. Le Roi Jones 

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others. Pascal 

The tongue of man is a twisty thing, there are plenty of words there, of every kind, the range of words is wide, and their variance. Homer 

Least said is soonest disavowed. Ambrose Bierce 

Eloquence wins its great and enduring fame quite as much from the benches of our opponents as from those of our friends. Tacitus 

Intelligence is silence, truth being invisible. But what a racket I make in declaring this. Ned Rorem 

The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard. William Hazlitt 

What is conceived well is expressed clearly; and the words to say it with arrive with ease.  Nicolas Boileau 

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.  Emerson 

It’s when the thing itself is missing that you have to supply the word.  Henry De Montherlant 

There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear, and welcome. Robert Louis Stevenson 

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all the forms and degrees of human comprehension. Ezra Pound 

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music. Oliver Wendell Holmes 

Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable. Cicero 

When I struggle to be terse, I end by being obscure. Horace

The dumbness in the eyes of animals is more touching than the speech of man, but the dumbness in the speech of men is more agonizing than the eyes of animals. Unknown 

We oftener say things because we can say them well, than because they are sound and reasonable. Walter Savage Landor

The silence of the pure innocence persuades when speaking fails. Shakespeare 

When orators and auditors have the same prejudices, those prejudices run a great risk of being made to stand for incontestable truths. Joseph Roux  

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly. T. S. Eliot

If to talk to oneself when alone is folly; it must be doubly unwise to listen to oneself in the presence of others. Baltasar Gracian

To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use the language created to express the world of yesterday.  The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language. Saint-Exupery  

What oh wise man is the tongue in the mouth? It is a key to the casket of the intellectual treasurer; so long as the lid remains shut how can any person say whether he be a dealer in gems or in pedlery?  Sadi

If a people have no word for something, either it does not matter to them or it matters too much to talk about. Edgar Z. Friedenberg 

Quotes about Books and Literature

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. Cyril Connolly 

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. W. H. Auden

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature. Julio Cortazar 

The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed. Anthony Burgess,

Most of today’s books have an air of having been written in one day from books read the night before. Chamfort

The existence of good bad literature; the fact that no one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously is a reminder that art is not the same thing as celebration. George Orwell

When one can read, can penetrate the enchanted realm of books, why write? Colette 

Most people won’t realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship it like anything else. Katherine Anne Porter 

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Truman Capote 

A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lays a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes. William Sansom 

The bare objects of a book, or of a story, might also have a subtle relation to our own past. ... It is where lies part of the pleasure and urgency.  It is one of the ways an author speaks to a reader, and becomes integrated into the reader’s own imaginative life.  Even the most sophisticated readers read novels in the light of their own experience, and in such recognition, sympathy may begin.  Source: My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers. Ernest Dimnet 

Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse. Joseph Roux

The most thrilling version of the Bible was printed in 1631 by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the King’s printers at London. It contained several mistakes, but one was inspired, for the word “not” was omitted from the Seventh Commandment and enjoined its readers, on the highest authority, to commit adultery. 

A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read. Mark Twain

The illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is Amorphous, literature is formal. Francoise Sagan 

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. T. S. Eliot

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. Mark Twain

I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that nature with which I am acquainted. Mythology comes nearest to it of any. Henry David Thoreau

A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it. T. S. Eliot

Perversity is the muse of modern literature. Susan Sontag

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind. Thomas Macaulay

An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many and grows old with their sick hearts. Juvenal 

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous. Robert Benchley

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. Ezra Pound

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of the various, the possibility, complexity, and difficulty. Lionel Trilling 

There is much trickery required to grow rich by a stupid book as there is folly in buying it. LA Bruyere 

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right. John K. Hutchens 

Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon

A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read. G. K. Chesterton

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. Somerset Maugham

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn’t be mixed. And if they are, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink. Catherine Drinker Bowen

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Charles Lamb

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman. Boris Pasternak 

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Virginia Woolf

In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratifications, is a curious anticlimax. Alfred Kazin

Books give not wisdom where none before was, but where some is, their reading makes it more.  Sir John Harrington

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. Robert Frost 

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. Emerson 

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction. A. Bevan

Have you any right to read, especially novels, until you have exhausted the best part of the day in some employment that is called practical? Charles Dudley Warner 

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.  Salvatore Quasimodo 

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force. Montaigne 

The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. Emerson

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they are written. Thoreau 

Isn’t it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists? Kelvin Throop

My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out. Oliver Wendell Holmes 

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. Andre Gide 

Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard-covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five-cent books are different. John Steinbeck 

When we read too fast or too slowly we understand nothing. Pascal

Poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men. Goethe 

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. Georges Simenon 

The poet begins where the man ends. The man’s lot is to live his human life; the poet’s to invent what is nonexistent. Jose Ortega Y Gasset 

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words. Maurice Maeterlinck 

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself. Marianne Moore

The business man who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview. V. S. Pritchett 

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who are minded beyond reason the opinion of others. Virginia Woolf 

Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us. David Riesman 

Biography broadens the vision and allows us to live a thousand lives in one. Elbert Hubbard

The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books. Christopher Morley  

Few books have more than one thought; the generality indeed have not quite so many. Julius and Augustus Hare

Authors are sometimes like tomcats; they distrust all other toms, but they are kind to kittens. Malcolm Cowley 

The poet camouflages, in the expression of joy, his despair at not having found its reality.  Max Jacob 

He that does not expect a million readers should not write a line. Goethe

The first thing to have in a library is a shelf. From time to time this can be decorated with literature, but the shelf is the main thing. Finley Peter Dunne 

Those things, for which we find words, are things that we have already overcome. Nietzsche 

There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it. Longfellow

As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical. Longfellow 

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write. Epictetus 

Journalism is literature in a hurry. Matthew Arnold

We poets in our youth begin in gladness; but thereof come in the end despondency and madness. William Wordsworth