Effective Communication - Select Quotes

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choicest words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.
~ Edwin H. Friedman

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.
~ Rachel Naomi Remen

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
~ Mark Twain

Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.
~ Robert Greenleaf

Brevity is the soul of wit.
~ William Shakespeare

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.
~ William Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost

“And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?”
~ Anne in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables

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

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.
~ Pearl S. Buck

This communicating of a man’s self to his friend works two contrary effects, for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.
~ Francis Bacon

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
~ Rudyard Kipling

Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
~ Character in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion

They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
~ Carl W. Buechner

One kind word can warm three winter months.
~ Japanese proverb

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
~ Ambrose Bierce

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I’m going to learn, I must do it by listening.
~ Larry King

The silence often of pure innocence
Persuades when speaking fails.
~ William Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale

One can say everything best over a meal.
~ George Eliot in Adam Bede

No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.
~ Montaigne

It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.”
~ Yogi Berra

The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.
~ George Bernard Shaw

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
~ Strother Martin playing the Captain in the movie Cool Hand Luke

Two monologues do not make a dialogue.
~ Jeff Daly

If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
~ Woodrow Wilson

English is the perfect language for preachers because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say.
~ Garrison Keillor.

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in picture of silver.
~ Proverbs 25:11

How lovely on the mountains Are the feet of him who brings good news, Who announces peace And brings good news of happiness, Who announces salvation, And says to Zion, “Your God reigns!”
~ Isaiah 52:7

Information is giving out; communication is getting through.
~ John C. Maxwell

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson