796 quotes found
“All communication is a sign of failure. If everybody is pleased with the situation, then there is no need for communication.”
“Compassion is essential, but it’s not a substitute for self-expression, or self-respect, or self-compassion. Emotional self-care is also essential, but gently soothing our wounds does not replace c...”
“Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to m...”
“We all want, above all, to be heard. We want to be understood—heard for what we think we are saying, for what we know we meant.”
“- If no one understands anything in the same way, what use is communication? - The best way to recycle empty soup cans is to tie a string to them and talk to yourself - from up to a mile away.”
“We float in language like icebergs – four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.”
“What said those two souls communicating through the language of the eyes, more perfect than that of the lips, the language given to the soul in order that sound may not mar the ecstasy of feeling? ...”
“You don’t realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.”
“All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there ...”
“Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.”
“They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.”
“A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it withou...”
“They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. Why would they ever develop language? Why would ...”
“Over the years, they’d become accomplished at avoiding unpleasant topics. Their burdened demeanors spoke volumes through the silence.”
“In an age that valued prolonged and detailed exposition, complexity, and repetition it was astonishing that Luther should have instinctively discerned the value of brevity.”
“Silence is also a form of speaking.”
“It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.”
“Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a human ...”
“Martin Luther was a thoroughly educated man but he wore this lightly. His sermons were littered with only examples and improving tales, drawing equally from the fables of Aesop and the follies of l...”
“Many times in life I've regretted the things I've said without thinking. But I've never regretted the things I said nearly as much as the words I left unspoken.”
