Striving for accurate communication in written and oral form.
Think clearly!
“A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn’t make sense.”
James Thurber
“Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.”
Werner Karl Heisenberg
“He who guards his mouth keeps his life, but he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin.”
Proverbs 13:3
“It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
“If you can’t write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don’t have a clear idea.”
David Belasco
“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.”
Mark Twain
“Within the word we find two dimensions—reflection and action. If one is sacrificed even in part, the other immediately suffers. To speak a true word is to transform the world.”
Paulo Freire
“I do not so easily think in words…after being hard at work having arrived at results that are perfectly clear…I have to translate my thoughts in a language that does not run evenly with them.”
Francis Galton
“The world has the habit of making room for the man whose actions show that he knows where he is going.”
Napoleon Hill
“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
Albert Einstein
“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”
Henri Bergson
“An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction.”
Booker T. Washington
“This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.”
Winston Churchill
“We sometimes get all the information, but we refuse to get the message.”
Cullen Hightower
“It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.”
Michael De Montaigne
“There are people who want to be everywhere at once…and they get nowhere.”
Carl Sandburg
“I really lack the words to compliment myself today.”
Alberto Tomba
“Watch your thoughts, they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”
Frank Outlaw
“The temple of our purest thoughts is silence.”
Sarah J. Hale
“Our intention creates our reality.”
Wayne Dyer
“I cannot always control what goes on outside. But I can always control what goes on inside.”
Wayne Dyer
“What we don’t understand we don’t possess.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“I think the language is one factor that has prevented us from being able even to conceptualize mind/body processes. Just the fact that we use one kind of intangible language to describe the mind and another kind of material language to describe the body—languages that don’t even have a way of connecting—prevents us from seeing that these two kinds of phenomena are actually two manifestations of the same process, neither one more important than the other, and neither causing the other. If we ca figure out ways to talk that allow us to think about the mind and body as one and the same, we’d be better off.”
Margaret Kemeny
“Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it, but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.”
Charles A. Lindbergh
“Better understated than overstated. Let people be surprised that it was more than you promised and easier than you said.”
Jim Rohn
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
Rudyard Kipling
“True eloquence consists of saying all that should be said, and that only.”
Francois de La Rochefoucald
“To communicate, put your words in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.”
William Safire
“Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.”
Peter Benchley
“…everything that can be said can be said clearly.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Be careful of your thoughts; they may become words at any moment.”
Ira Gassen
“It is better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and resolve all doubt.”
Abraham Lincoln
“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us worthy evidence of the fact.”
George Eliot
“Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.”
Josh Billings
“…if you cannot say what you have to say in twenty minutes, you should go away and write a book about it.”
Lord Brabizon
“The words you choose to say something are just as important as the decision to speak.”
Unknown
“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what other men say in whole books—what other men do not say in whole books.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“I tell you everything that is really nothing, and nothing of what is everything, do not be fooled by what I am saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I am not saying.”
Charles C. Finn
“If you just communicate you can get by. But if you skillfully communicate, you can work miracles.”
Jim Rohn, speaker and author
“Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools talk because they have to say something.”
Plato
“All my life I’ve wanted to be somebody. But I see now I should have been more specific.”
Jane Wagner, writer and director
“To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but that an equally great one is to know the right moment to stop.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.”
Edward Thorndike
“Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”
Benjamin Franklin
“Before speaking, consider the interpretation of your words as well as their intent.”
Andrew Alden
“Be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams.
The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.”
Robert Southey, poet
“It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps one to see, not perhaps the way out, but the way in.”
A.C. Benson, author
“The investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education.”
Antisthenes, philosopher
“They talk most who have the least to say.”
Matthew Prior
“Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.”
Martin Tupper
“How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things but by how well we are understood.”
Andy Grove, CEO, Intel Corporation
“Successful communication transforms your thoughts, will, and desire into action. It moves people. It transforms the thoughts, will and desires of others. What better word for this process than magic?”
Jack Griffin, author from How to Say it at Work
“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.”
Chinese Proverb
“‘When I use a word,’ said Humpty Dumpty, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.'”
Lewis Carroll
“Language is what makes people human, and it is the primary way we have of knowing who other people are.”
Janet Malcolm
“From listening comes wisdom, and from speaking repentance.”
Italian Proverb
“One never repents of having spoken too little but often of having spoken too much.”
Philippe de Commynes
“I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”
Ernest Hemingway
“It has often been said there’s so much to be read, you never can cram all those words in your head. So the writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads. That is why my belief is the briefer the brief is, the greater the sigh of the reader’s relief is.”
Dr. Seuss aka Theodor Seuss Geisel
“Never miss a good chance to shut up.”
Will Rogers
“To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.”
Confucius
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
William Blake
“Least said is soon disavowed.”
Ambrose Bierce
“When you have nothing to say, say nothing.”
Charles Caleb Colton
“Maximo in minimo”
Friedrich Hšlderlin
“But far more numerous was the Herd of such, Who think too little, and talk too much.”
John Dryden, British poet and dramatist
“If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation. If fifteen minutes, three days. If half an hour, two days, and if an hour, I am ready right now.”
Woodrow Wilson
“I have made this letter long, only because I lacked the time to make it short.”
Blaise Pascal, French philosopher
“Silence is better than unmeaning words.”
Pythagoras
“Meaning is not what you start with, but what you end up with.”
Peter Elbow
“It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ means.”
Bill Clinton
“Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.”
Alfred Adler
“Good has two meanings: it means that which is good absolutely and that which is good for somebody.”
Aristotle
“No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean.”
Henry Brooks Adams
“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.”
Jean Baudrillard
“Your own words are the bricks and mortar of the dreams you want to realize. Your words are the greatest power you have. The words you choose and their use establish the life you experience.”
Sonia Croquette
“The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.”
Mark Twain
“Words represent your intellect. The sound, gesture and movement represent your feelings.”
Patricia Fripp
“The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”
Lady Dorothy Nevill, British writer and socialite
“People use jargon because they want to sound smart and credible when in fact they sound profoundly dim-witted and typically can’t be understood, which defeats the purpose of speaking in the first place.”
Karen Friedman, author of Shut Up and Say Something, as quoted by Forbes
“Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they can talk sense.”
Robert Frost
“Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.”
John Maynard Keynes, British economist
