John Dryden Quotes

Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.

The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.

When the public doesn't understand me, it's a battle. So when I choose words, I choose them for their musicality, rhythm, and sense, and I choose the right dialect to express that.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

It is not sufficient to know what one ought to say, but one must also know how to say it.

The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.

Why do we embroider everything we say with special emphasis when all we really need to do is simply say what needs to he said? Of course the fact is that there is very little that needs to be said.

When we are understood, we always speak well, and then all your fine diction serves no purpose.

There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

He can thread a needle with a well-turned phrase.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

To speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do is style.

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

How or by what magic is it, that we convey our thoughts to one another with such case and accuracy?

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

Generally, the more words you use to say something, the less power those words have.

As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.

He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.

Eloquence is the child of knowledge.

What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.

Great speeches have always had great soundbites. The problem now is that the young technicians who put together speeches are paying attention only to the soundbite, not to the text as a whole, not realizing that all great soundbites happen by accident, which is to say, all great soundbites are yielded up inevitably, as part of the natural expression of the text. They are part of the tapestry, they aren't a little flower somebody sewed on.