Communication Depth Quotes

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word.

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

Digital communication is completely different from in-person, face-to-face conversations. One will give you surface insights, and the other really gives you depth.

You do have all five sense when you're in a room together. You communicate and understand each other in a much deeper way. It is a different form of communication from writing or being on the web.

There are 500 million people on Facebook, but what are they saying to each other? Not much.

If the only reason to be on stage communicating with people is to tell them a joke and make them laugh, that seems thin for me. That has a place - I don't think it should stop happening - but for me, I don't know. I just don't.

The declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

Why is it that you can sometimes feel the reality of people more keenly through a letter than face to face?

I am shamed to realize that in my marriage, my daughters never heard their father and me fight, which also meant, perhaps, that we didn't truly communicate.

Silence is ever speaking; it is the perennial flow of language.

Language is not just a code; you are writing into its history, into its tides.

Words are probes. Some reach very deep, some only to a little depth.

Everything is now moving fast so communication has to be fast as well. But the tragedy is that we have attained this speed at the cost of depth of words.

It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they "speak with the accent of natives" they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.