Stanislaw Jerzy Lec Quotes

I am not eloquent.

Speech is the small change of silence.

None love to speak so much, when the mood of speaking comes, as they who are naturally taciturn.

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

Before I speak, I have something important to say.

According to my wife, my use of vocabulary is wide and varied.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

Every speaker has a mouth; An arrangement rather neat. Sometimes it's filled with wisdom. Sometimes it's filled with feet.

Words are powerful. When I make mistakes I just try to come back and clarify what I meant.

If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.

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.

You say it best, when you say nothing at all.

Language is wine upon the lips.

The inarticulate speak longest.

You can't be silent and create silence in being silent. So you have to create silence or, rather, the effect of silence, through words.

Instead of sounding pretentious, phony, or repetitive, I'd rather not speak.

I guess my diction just isn't very good.

Words," he said, "is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life.

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

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictions word, preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.