Oliver Goldsmith Quotes

Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absentminded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison.

Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes.

It is of eloquence as of a flame; it requires matter to feed it, and motion to excite it; and it brightens as it burns.

There is no eloquence which does not agitate the soul.

The first time I heard Ron Whitehead read I felt what I imagine those who heard Abraham Lincoln deliver The Gettysburg Address felt.

There is no talent so pernicious as eloquence to those who have it under command.

The passions are the only orators that always persuade: they are, as it were, a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without it.

Silence is like a flame, you see?

Eloquence dwells quite as much in the hearts of the hearers as on the lips of the orator.

Where judgment has wit to express it, there's the best orator.

The longer I live, the more I have come to value the gift of eloquence. Every American youth, if he desires for any purpose to get influence over his countrymen in an honorable way, will seek to become a good public speaker.

Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.

that your power of command with simple language was one of the magnificent things of our century. (from the poem: result)

The bucolic mind of East Barsetshire took warm delight in the eloquence of the eminent personage who represented them, but was wont to extract more actual enjoyment from the music of his periods than from the strength of his arguments.

If it is naturally in you to be a good orator, a notable orator you will be when you have acquired knowledge and practice.

Those who listened to Lord Chatham felt that there was something finer in the man, than anything which he said.

Gold is a deep-persuading orator.

Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.

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

It is true that despite occasional gleams of Churchillian eloquence he [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] usually spoke poorly. He was far more effective in conversations a deux. But those who dismiss him as shallow because his rhetoric was fustian err.

Churchill wrote his own speeches. When a leader does that, he becomes emotionally invested with his utterances...If Churchill had had a speech write in 1940, Britain would be speaking German today.

If someone strikes my heart, it does not break, but it bursts, and the flame coming out of it becomes a torch on my path.

Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity.

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.