Frances Hesselbein Quotes

If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts.

When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it should be rejected.

The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion - in the long run, these are the only people who count.

Students, when you want to say something, think about it three times before you say it. Speak only if your words will benefit yourselves and others. Do not speak if it brings no benefit.

People who think well, write well

Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.

Typing is no substitute for thinking.

He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them.

There are so many people, especially among our comrades, who imagine that words are nothing - on the contrary, isn't it true that saying a thing well is as interesting and as difficult as painting it?

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

When you forget yourself and your fear, when you get beyond self-consciousness because your mind is thinking about what you are trying to communicate, you become a better communicator

I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think. I mean if you can get a whole room full of drunk, stoned people to actually wake up and think, you're doing something.

For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.

Language is the dress of thought; and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanics, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy

I've found that people who look at things as they are, and not as they wish them to be, are the ones who succeed.

... clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.

True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.

The value of a story isn't that it just has a narcotic effect. It's that it awakens something in you that makes you want to think, that makes you talk to other people, that stirs something that makes you examine the story that eventually turns into self-examination.

When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking.

I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.

Sound judgment is the ground of writing well.

I think people actually notice sometimes the content of what one is saying rather than the decibel level at which he says it. And a lot of times when people don't have a lot to say, they increase the volume.

I think I have to be aware of how much power words can have. And it makes me consider everything that I say before I say it, because you can really help a lot of people, or you can really, really mess things up.

It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.

If people thought a quarter of what they speak, this world would be heaven.