Isaac Watts Quotes

Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument.

I do like to turn a phrase, but it's all about how you turn it.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

Young people are dazzled by the brilliancy of antithesis, and employ it. Matter-of-fact men, and those who like precision, naturally fall into comparisons and metaphor. Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied even with hyperbole. As for the sublime, it is only great geniuses and those of the very highest order that are able to rise to its height.

The receipt to make a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and easy. Take common sense quantum sufficit; add a little application to the rules and orders of the House [of Commons], throw obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity of purity, correctness and elegancy of style. Take it for granted that by far the greatest part of mankind neither analyze nor search to the bottom; they are incapable of penetrating deeper than the surface.

The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

The laws of literature, like the laws of gossip, usually demand exaggeration, decontextualization, a heightened or minimalized reality, and a lot more shape and order and impact than everyday life.

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.

One of your jobs as a speechwriter is to transform the bureaucratic into the poetic.

My art, like my acting, is a profound expression of poetic license.

If you look at the copies of Churchill's speeches that have survived, they are heavily marked up. He was scrupulous about the impact of each word. He preferred short words and the repetition of short words. He knew everything about the techniques of rhetoric.

True eloquence scorns eloquence.

we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

The vulgar look upon a man, who is reckoned a fine speaker, as a phenomenon, a supernatural being, and endowed with some peculiargift of Heaven; they stare at him, if he walks in the park, and cry, that is he. You will, I am sure, view him in a juster light, and nulla formidine. You will consider him only as a man of good sense, who adorns common thoughts with the graces of elocution, and the elegancy of style. The miracle will then cease.

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.

I am sure that there is no place in the world where your message would not be enhanced by your making the place (whether tiny or large, a hut or a palace) orderly, artistic and beautiful with some form of creativity, some form of ‘art’ (p. 213).

To make advice agreeable, try paradox or rhyme.

The poetry of speech.

Epithets, like pepper, Give zest to what you write; And if you strew them sparely, They whet the appetite: But if you lay them on too thick, You spoil the matter quite!

Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful.

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.