If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
Be silent always when you doubt your sense.
Kind words are short to speak but their echoes are endless.
Think about this old adage from the world of negotiations: "Whoever speaks next, loses."
We lightly jest, with heedless words that never should be spoken; and do not know how words can bruise nor wounded hearts be broken.
In 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan delivered one of the most unique and stunning conclusions ever to a political acceptance speech. Just at the climax, when the convention hall was energized and ready to erupt, Reagan pivoted to the need for divine help and guidance on the journey toward a better America. He then asked every citizen to join him in a moment of silent prayer. Instead of ending on a red-meat applause line, Reagan ended with divinely centered silence! We clearly could use a little more silence in our public discourse.
I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say.
When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.
Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.
Be a good listener. Your ears will never get you in trouble.
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning...
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.
The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved...
Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.
In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.
If you speak when angry, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.
Whatever advice you give, be brief.
The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.
It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.
It is the providence of knowledge to speak and the privilege of wisdom to listen.
I often regret that I have spoken; never that I have been silent.
When we speak to each other, we memorize that speech and then that has an influence on our own speech production. In effect, we transmit and infect one another with pronunciations every time we interact with others. Over time, if we have regular and prolonged contact with someone, we can start to pick up their sounds. For people living in an isolated community – perhaps a village in a remote valley, or a settlement on the other side of an ocean – this would lead to accent drift as quirks or misperceptions of speech become exaggerated.
People who know little are usually great talkers, while people who know much say little.
Never trust your tongue when your heart is bitter.
Secret thoughts and open countenance will go safely over the whole world.
He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest.
The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.
Remember a closed mouth gathers no foot.
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.