Conversation Quotes

No man ever listened himself out of a job.

Calvin Coolidge

Sweet Benjamin, since thou art young, and hast not yet the use of tongue, make it thy slave, while thou art free; Imprison it, lest it do thee.

John Hoskins

A good old man, sir. He will be talking. As they say, when the age is in, the wit is out.

William Shakespeare

Speech is the small change of silence.

George Meredith

They that are loudest in their threats are the weakest in the execution of them. It is probable that he who is killed by lightning hears no noise; but the thunder-clap which follows, and which most alarms the ignorant, is the surest proof of their safety.

Charles Caleb Colton

There is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation! A human being, Hastings, cannot resist the opportunity to reveal himself and express his personality which conversation gives him. Every time he will give himself away.

Agatha Christie

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

Jorge Luis Borges

People resent articulacy, as if articulacy were a form of vice.

Frederic Raphael

Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus

What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.

Hansell B. Duckett

Conversation is an exercise of the mind; gossip is merely an exercise of the tongue.

Source Unknown

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

Bertrand Russell

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation?

Maupassant

What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.

W. Somerset Maugham

I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.

Edward Dahlberg

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.

Edward George BulwerLytton

My great-grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who repeated it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one will ever shine in conversation, who thinks of saying fine things: to please, one must say many things indifferent, and many very bad.

Francis Lockier

A man's style is his mind's voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.

Ralph Waldo Emerson