Quotes to inspire and reflect

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more easily than their words.

It is easy to utter what has been kept silent, but impossible to recall what has been uttered.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas.

Every man may speak truly, but to speak methodically, prudently, and fully is a talent that few men have.

The trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility.

Whom the disease of talking still once posses- seth, he can never hold his peace.

Nobody talks much that doesn’t say unwise things—things he did not mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note sometimes.

No glass renders a man’s form or likeness so true as his speech.

People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.

The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.

In much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. / For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one.

Is there any place where there is no traffic in empty talk? Is there on this earth one who does not worship himself talking?

When you speak to a man, look on his eyes; when he speaks to you, look on his mouth.

Do not say things. What you are stands over you the while and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?

Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.

Loquacity, n. A disorder which renders the sufferer unable to curb his tongue when you wish to talk.

The first meal in Spain was always a shock with the hors d’oeuvres, an egg course, two meat courses, vegetables, salad, and dessert and fruit.

To speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words or in good order.

He whose mouth is out of taste says the wine is flat.

In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

A deep distress hath humanised my Soul.

In heaven above, / And earth below, they best can serve true gladness / Who meet most feelingly the calls of sadness.

No emotion falls into dislike so readily as sorrow.

When people fall in deep distress, their native sense departs.

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

It is sweet to mingle tears with tears; / Griefs, where they wound in solitude, / Wound more deeply.

Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?

There is a sort of pleasure in indulging of grief.

Take this sorrow to thy heart, and make it a part of thee, and it shall nourish thee till thou art strong again.

We collected in a group in front of their door, and we experienced within ourselves a grief that was new for us, the ancient grief of the people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed in every century.

Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched.

There is not / any advantage to be won from grim lamentation.

It is better to drink of deep griefs than to taste shallow pleasures.

Learn weeping, and thou shalt gain laughing.

Sorrow makes us all children again.

There are some men above grief and some men below it.

Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.

Man sheds grief as his skin sheds rain.

Grief should be the instructor of the wise; / Sorrow is Knowledge.

Grief is not in the nature of things, but in opinion.

Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.

Grief drives men into habits of serious reflection, sharpens the understanding and softens the heart.