Speech proverbs

Page 4

◆ You never really learn much from hearing yourself speak.

- George Clooney99

◆ Self-consciousness kills communication.

- Rick Steves99

◆ What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

- Jacques Derrida99

◆ Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.

- Muriel Barbery99

◆ Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

- Toni Morrison99

◆ A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.

- Baltasar Gracián99

◆ We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

- Oliver Sacks99

◆ Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.

- Stephen Fry99

◆ His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

- J.M. Coetzee99

◆ My father always said that too many words cheapened the value of a man's speech.

- Patricia Briggs99

◆ Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.

- Hermann Hesse99

◆ To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

- Barack Obama99

◆ So yes, I say things I regret constantly, and I just can't help it.

- Kathy Griffin99

◆ No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.

- Ayn Rand99

◆ Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

- Barack Obama99