Blaise Pascal Quotes

No man was ever eloquent by trying to be eloquent, but only by being so.

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.

There is no power like oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears, Cicero by . . . swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished; that of the other continues to this day.

Truth is not so threadbare as speech, because fewer people can make use of it.

ORATORY, n. A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography.

The best and most telling speech is not the actual impromptu one but the counterfeit of it.

There is a truth and beauty in rhetoric; but it oftener serves ill turns than good ones.

I have no gift of words, but I speak the truth.

The simplest man with passion will be more persuasive than the most eloquent without.

Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,--a Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.

Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?

Eloquence; it requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true.

When you have the goods, you don't need to dress up what you're writing.

When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception.

Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are the loudest when least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of nature; she often gives us the lightning without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning.

The less there is of eloquence, the more there is of love.

If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

Prayer is not eloquence but earnestness.

You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music. The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it's real. I don't think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can't fool everybody.

The speeches to be wary of are those that begin with I'm just going to say a few words.

Lying is too much trouble. You have to make sure to taste each word before letting it off your tongue. I hate that. It's hard enough making people understand without lying.

Shame on all eloquence which leaves us with a taste for itself and not for its substance.

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory !!

Too great cleverness is but deceptive delicacy, true delicacy is the most substantial cleverness.

You can't say you want things to be simple and then in the next breath ask me to be honest.