Virginia Woolf Quotes

Eloquence is the poetry of prose.

Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.

A great speech is literature.

We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire

… sledgehammer eloquence...

Speaking is a beautiful folly; with that man dances over all things.

Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.

The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator.

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

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

I am not eloquent.

Speech is the small change of silence.

The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society.

I love the power of words - no music or special effects - and I want to demonstrate that power.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.

Talking and eloquence are not the same.

Some eloquence is like a magic.

I often begin a thought with spirit and finish it with nonsense. The chain of my argument often escapes me, and when lost can seldom be retrieved. These faults are so overpowering that I should sink into perpetual silence were it not that sometimes in ardor of debate, when my feelings are wound up to a high tone, elocution pours itself along with unusual rapidity, and I have passages which would not shame a good speaker; this is the only thing that makes me tolerable to others or to myself.

We love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say.

As reason is the glory of man, so the lamp of reason is eloquence.

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

An orator is a man who says what he thinks and feels what he says.

I'm not good at throwing around rhetoric.