What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
~ Strother Martin playing the Captain in the movie Cool Hand Luke
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
It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.”
~ Yogi Berra
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
~ Ambrose Bierce
Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.
~ Pearl S. Buck
They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
~ Carl W. Buechner
Two monologues do not make a dialogue.
~ Jeff Daly
One can say everything best over a meal.
~ George Eliot in Adam Bede
The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.
~ Robert Greenleaf
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
English is the perfect language for preachers because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say.
~ Garrison Keillor.
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
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
~ Rudyard Kipling
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Information is giving out; communication is getting through.
~ John C. Maxwell
No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.
~ Montaigne
“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
When you forget yourself and your fear, when you get beyond self-consciousness because your mind is thinking bout what you are trying to communicate, you become a better communicator.
~ Peggy Noonan, in Simply Speaking (NY: HarperCollins, 1998), page 8
One kind word can warm three winter months.
~ Japanese proverb
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
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
The silence often of pure innocence
Persuades when speaking fails.
~ William Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale
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
The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.
~ George Bernard Shaw
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
~ Mark Twain
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
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in picture of silver.
~ Bible, 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!”
~ Bible, Isaiah 52:7
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Always be aware that there is a brief magical moment in every relationship when the right statement will change a life forever.
~ Ed Anderson and John E. Peterson, in Loving Words Every Child Needs To Hear (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998).
By words the mind is excited and the spirit elated.
~ Aristophanes
A man’s command of the language is most important. Next to kissing, it’s the most exciting form of communication mankind has evolved.
~ Oren Arnold
Men believe that a society is disintegrating when it can no longer be pictured in familiar terms. Unhappy is a people that has run out of words to describe what is going on.
~ Thurman Arnold
A word after a word after a word is power.
~ Margaret Atwood
I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
~ Jane Austen
“Plain English”–everybody loves it, demands it–from the other fellow.
~ Jacques Barzun
Words are as vital to life as food and drink and sex, but on the whole we don’t show as much interest in language as we do in the other–more obvious–pleasures.
~ Gyles Brandreth
Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.
~Gerald Brenan
Standard English is a convenient abstraction, like the average man.
~ G. L. Brook
Words are like planets, each with its own gravitational pull.
~ Kenneth Burke
Be not a slave of words.
~ Thomas Carlyle
The manner of your speaking is full as important as the matter, as more people have ears to be tickled than understanding to judge.
~ Lord Chesterfield
Words have power. We must set out to harness that power with a clear awareness that words can both tear down and build up. They are much like a sharp knife that in the hands of a surgeon can heal, but in the hands of a careless child can kill. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” (Proverbs 18:21)
~ Larry Crabb, in Encouragement: The Key To Caring
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of demons.
~ Aldous Huxley
We see words that blow like leaves in the winds of autumn–golden words, bronze words, words that catch the light like opals. We learn that words have an independent life of their own, grown out of echoes and connotations and associations. We see that words are tactile; we find rough words, smooth words, words with splintered edges, words to shout or whisper with, words that caress, words that strike.
~ James J. Kilpatrick
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
~ Rudyard Kipling.
True eloquence consists of saying all that should be, not all that could be, said.
~ La Rochefoucauld
True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.
~ Alexander Pope
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.
~ Chinese Proverb
One kind word can warm three winter months.
~ Japanese Proverb
One should not aim at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.
~ Quintillian
Time had no special significance for a certain juvenile and incorrigible fisher of words who thought nothing of fishing for two weeks to catch a stanza, or even a line, that he would not throw back into a squirming sea of language where there was every word but the one he wanted. There were strange and iridescent and impossible words that would seize the bait and swallow the hook and all but drag the excited angler in after them, but lie that famous catch of Hiawatha’s, they were generally not the fish he wanted. he wanted fish that were smooth and shining and subtle, and very much alive, and not too strange, and presently, after long patience and many rejections, they began to bite.
~ Edwin Arlington Robinson
Words are a heavy thing…they weigh you down. If birds talked, they couldn’t fly.
~ Sy Rosen and Christian Williams, in Northern Exposure, On Your Own
If . . . you are willing to think about how we communicate, and consider the words and the forms of grammar, then you are automatically a member of the Authority, entitled to a ring and a secret handshake and the thrill of membership. A word of warning: If you get hooked on the study of the language, you are in that sorority, or fraternity, for life.
~ William Safire
Every utterance is an event, and no two events are precisely alike. The extreme view, therefore, is that no word ever means the same thing twice.
~ Louis B. Saloman
Most people have to talk so they won’t hear.
~ May Sarton
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them a the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.
~ Dorothy Sayers, in The Lost Tools of Learning
Syllables govern the world.
~ John Selden
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
~ William Shakespeare
Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech; that your native tongue is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
~ George Bernard Shaw
The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later, with astounding accuracy.
~ Florence Shinn
Words too are known by the company they keep.
~ Joseph Shipley
When it comes to learning good English, most people are prone to be supine.
~ John Simon
It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
~ Robert Southey
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
~ Adlai Stevenson
Language was given to conceal men’s thoughts.
~ Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
A word to the wise is sufficient.
~ Terence
One always refers to language as a tool; but after playing around with more years that there legitimately are, i tell you that it is also, in a vulgar phrase, something else. More precious than pearls at any price, it is a marvelous toy, a plaything of the mind.
~ Joe D. Thomas
English is a language of marvelous qualities. I like to see it properly used just a one likes to see a shirt properly washed and a dinner table properly set.
~ Barbara Tuchman
A new word is like a wild animal you have caught. You must learn its ways and break it before you can use it.
~ H. G. Wells
“The great gift of conversation is less about displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others. Anyone who leaves your company pleased with himself and his own cleverness is very well pleased with you. ”
-Jean De La Bruyere
“The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”
-Dorothy Nevill
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“Don’t knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn’t start a conversation if it didn’t change once in a while.”
~ Kin Hubbard
“Nothing is so simple that it cannot be misunderstood.”
~ Freeman Teague Jr.
If you want to build a ship, then don’t drum up men to gather wood, give orders, and divide the work. Rather, teach them to yearn for the far and endless sea.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request.
~ Phillip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield
The following is a story I like to tell from time to time to illustrate the problem of communicating when the sender and receiver are not working from the same worldview or when the same vocabulary is used but a different lexicon.
* * *
There was a rather old fashioned lady, always quite delicate in her use of language. She and her husband were planning a weeks vacation to Florida, so she wrote to a particular campground asking for a reservation.
She wanted to make sure the campground was fully equipped, but didn’t quite know how to ask about the toilet facilities. She just couldn’t bring herself to write the word “toilet” in her letter. After much deliberation, she finally came up with the old fashioned term “Bathroom Commode”, but when she wrote that down, Read more
When Ken Blanchard asked Hall of Fame football coach Don Shula what he wanted on his epitaph, Shula replied that he wanted to be remembered as never having been guilty of “not noticing.”
As my children grow in number as well as size I’m afraid that I may be guilty all too often of “not noticing.” Do I notice the stick figure drawings that they pour their hearts into and post on the refrigerator? Do I notice enough of the details to genuinely praise them for their efforts? Do I notice which are their favorite toys? Do I notice when they add new words to their vocabulary? How much do I really notice?
I have often said that the most important thing we can learn about interpersonal relationships from Jesus of Nazareth is that he always treated the person in front of him as if that person was the most important person in the world. No one could ever accuse him “not noticing”. Zachaeus in his tree, the man born blind, the little children that surrounded him — Jesus noticed them, and treated them as if they were the most important people in the world.
If I plan on making this a model for my own life, maybe the best place for me to practice is in my own home.
Friends left this week to head back to India. Will we stay in touch? We said we would, but I am not the best at maintaining frequent (or even infrequent) communication. And, it’s not like I have good excuses. Trueroots, an international calling card service, offers rates for calls to India that aren’t much different than if I was calling within the U.S.A. Trueroots is much more than india phone cards and will soon be offering their customers exclusive access to full length movies (including Bollywood), TV Series, sports coverage, video games, music downloads, karaoke and alot more… Cool. Maybe that will be an incentive for people like me who mean well and fully intend on staying in touch, but need a little prompting.
