Nancy Duarte Quotes

The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

I hope people know that when I'm sitting there, it's not some guy on a desk on a platform with sort of this voice-of-God approach.

He knew he couldn't tell stories, that he always included extraneous details & tangents that interested only him.

Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.

A single ego is an absurdly narrow vantage point from which to view the world.

I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

A one-sided analysis of anything always leads you into the wrong direction.

The talking shows allow me to come out of my cave and that's why those shows go on for so long. I hate walking off stage. Sometimes I walk off and I miss them as I'm walking off the stage. I wonder if they'll let me go another hour. That's why I do it: to communicate, to get points across.

In a bird's eye view you tend to survey everything and decide on a particular point, then you swoop down and pick it up. In a worms eye view you don't have that advantage of looking at everything.

Being on TV in front of people is a lot different than sitting in a dark room with a microphone. When I had my radio show, I was on four hours a day for 20-something years. If you put a live microphone in front of Mother Teresa for that amount of time, she'd piss somebody off.

What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

I think the most important thing really was that you could take very personal ideas and present them to an audience in entertaining ways.

I learned what education really is: the penetrating deeper and rising higher into life, as well as making continually wider explorations; the rounding of the whole human being out of its nebulous elements into form, as planets and suns are rounded, until they give out safe and steady light. This makes the process a infinite one, not possible to be completed at any school.

Whenever I'm broadcasting, I like it. When I'm broadcasting I can't wait to hear what I say.

In a narrow circle the mind grows narrow. The more one expands, the larger their aims.

When I finished my college education my agent said to me …'The key to beauty is to be always educating yourself, always learning something new, always doing something new and to have something to talk about.' And I never forgot that, and I think that's how one ages beautifully.

When you are talking to 7 million viewers across the country, man you have got to represent everybody's views and have got to give them the impression that you are being as honest as you know how to be.

There is only one excuse for a speaker's asking the attention of his audience: he must have either truth or entertainment for them.

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

I think that actors are terrible communicators as people by and large. I think our tendency is to kind of be self-centered and tune people out and just kind of get really me-focused, so I think communication for actors is a big challenge actually.

It is a good lesson - though it may often be a hard one - for a man... to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.

Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.

I don't know how to speak to everybody, only to somebody.