Talking quotes
5.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"Yankees don't understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different."
"If you let a person talk long enough you'll hear their true intentions. Listen twice, speak once."
"If you're not gonna tell the truth, then why start talking?"
"I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies."
"The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now."
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"Brevity is the soul of command. Too much talking suggests desperation on the part of the leader. Speak shortly, decisively and to the point–and couch your desires in such natural logic that no one can raise objections. Then move on."
"The fastest, cleanest, most joyful way to break out of your own box is by dancing. I'm not talking about doing the stand-and-sway. I'm talking about dancing so deep, so hard, so full of the beat that you are nothing but the dance and the beat and the sweat and the heat."
"Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves."
"How are we going to get rid of racism? Stop talking about it!"
"We need to send our words out in the direction we want them to go. In other words, we need to start talking victory when we’re staring at defeat. We need to start talking healing when we’re feeling sick. We need to start blessing and prosperity when we don’t have anything. We need to speak about marching when we feel like quitting."
"Always keep a big bottle of booze at your side. If a bird starts talking nonsense to you in the middle of the night pour yourself a stiff drink."
"I tell the truth. And I know what I'm talking about. That's why I'm a threat."
"The problem with me is, I guess, the way I express myself, you have to be with me 50 years before you can get a sense of what I'm talking about."
"You can't pussyfoot around. When you're talking to lions, you can't meow like a pussycat."
"Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words."
"'Honesty' in social life is often used as a cover for rudeness. But there is quite a difference between being candid in what you're talking about, and people voicing their insulting opinions under the name of honesty."
"The folks who know the truth aren't talking.... The ones who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up!"
"A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man."
"The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach. This is possible but not attractive."
"Thinking is the soul talking to itself."
"A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet."
"Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this."
"The maintenance man is moving the thermostat in our office today. I started talking with him about the"
"It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?"
"Silence is something that comes from your heart, not from outside. Silence doesn't mean not talking and not doing things; it means that you are not disturbed inside. If you're truly silent, then no matter what situation you find yourself in you can enjoy the silence."
