Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Talking and eloquence are not the same.

I'm not good at throwing around rhetoric.

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

Speech is our second possession, after the soul-and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.

Speech is the best show a man puts on.

Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue.

Chauncy Burr ... talks well, possibly better than he thinks. But this is a common failing.

Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

It is amazing how much a thought expands and refines by being put into speech: I should think it could hardly know itself.

There are three things in speech that ought to be considered before some things are spoken--the manner, the place and the time.

In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses.

Say what you have to say and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending - sit down.

Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.

Prends l'e loquence et tords-lui son cou! Take eloquence and break its neck!

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

Anybody who makes speeches written by someone else is just a robot.

When Demosthenes was asked what were the three most important aspects of oratory, he answered, 'Action, Action, Action.'

Don't sit as if you have nothing to say. You should be bursting with things to say. You just choose at this particular place and time, not to say them.

I like to talk. Talking is kind of my thing. If talking had been a sport option at Wexford, I would have been captain. But sports always have to involve running, jumping, or swinging your arms around. You don’t get PE points for the smooth and rapid movement of the jaw.

Cicero said loud-bawling orators were driven by their weakness to noise, as lame men to take horse.

I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.

Writing is always harder than talking.

I cannot, nor I will not hold me still; My tongue, though not my heart, shall have his will.