Philip Gilbert Hamerton Quotes

That's the secret: be interesting. If you can't be interesting, shut up. There's nothing wrong with silence.

Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Be interesting, be enthusiastic... and don't talk too much.

A good listener is not someone with nothing to say. A good listener is a good talker with a sore throat.

In the first 20 seconds of talking, your light is green: your listener is liking you as long as your statement is relevant to the conversation and, hopefully, in service of the other person. But unless you are an extremely gifted raconteur, people who talk for more than roughly half a minute at a time are boring and often perceived as too chatty.

'Free speech' isn't speech at all if it's being used without listening, attention, or care.

I just want to have folks be comfortable and just share and have a good conversation. To me, that's kind of a lost art.

Listening well and answering well is one of the greatest perfections that can be obtained in conversation.

No discussion between two persons can be of any use, until each knows clearly what it is that the other asserts.

I have always felt that the only great thing about an interview is the questions that are asked.

A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.

If you want to be a good conversationalist, be a good listener. To be interesting, be interested.

Change comes from listening, learning, caring and conversation.

It's just about pushing yourself to realms that are uncharted. I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing, I don't know if it's any good, I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line. Not just a creative fantasy world or something like that, but a mood too.

I love funny women, and just being around them talking is fine with me. I love an interesting mind.

LADY STUTFIELD I adore silent men. MRS ALLONBY Oh, Ernest isn't silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don't know. I haven't listened to him for years.

A man who listens because he has nothing to say can hardly be a source of inspiration. The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternately absorbs and expresses ideas.

The only interesting ideas are heresies

Ah, Harry, how often this happens, even between the best of friends! Each of us believes that what he has to say is much more important than anything the other might have to contribute!

Too much polishing and you spoil things. There's a limit to the expressibility of ideas. You have a new thought, an interesting one. Then, as you try to perfect it, it ceases to be new and interesting, and loses the freshness with which it first occurred to you. You're spoiling it.

It's difficult for a company to be anywhere interesting in a world that is so dominated by prototypes and great and bright ideas.

Private, accidental, confidential conversation breeds thought. Clubs produce oftener words.

Great talkers do not stop for breath, and never look at the clock.

If only our great thinkers could learn to talk, and our great talkers could learn to think.