Eric Hoffer Quotes

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

Yes, time can be buoyed by wordlessness, but it needs to be anchored in words.

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

Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.

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.

I act as the tongue of you, ... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.

Leave words to them whom words, not doings, move.

Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

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

Thought is made in the mouth.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

The only thing you have to know are your words.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

Man can no more think without words than see without light.

I've always been very wordy; I've got a great vocabulary.

If you're ever struggling for something to say, just take a noun and verbalize it. Using simple words in new and interesting ways will creativize your presence.

Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. You have never spoken before.

He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone.

Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.

Thy words, I grant are bigger, for I wear not, my dagger in my mouth.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!

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

What a pity it is that there are so many words! Whenever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying it run into one's head together and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a ribbon ... or a husband.