Conversation Quotes

While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom the necessity of listening is what makes the right important.

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward and we want to sit in their radius. When we are listened to it creates us makes us unfold and expand.

Karl Menninger

A ceremony of self-wastage - good talkers are miserable they know that they have betrayed themselves that they have taken material which should have a life of its own to disperse it in noises upon the air.

Cyril Connolly

Wit is the salt of conversation not the food.

William Hazlitt

Debate is masculine conversation is feminine.

Louisa May Alcott

Never hold any one by the button or the hand in order to be heard out for if people are unwilling to hear you you had better hold your tongue than them.

Lord Chesterfield

Conversation enriches the understanding but solitude is the school of genius.

Edward Gibbon

Silence is one great art of conversation.

William Hazlitt

Conceit causes more conversation than wit.

La Rochefoucauld

The less men think the more they talk.

Charles Montesquieu

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues. That is all.

Rebecca West

He was one of those men whose constitutional inability to make small talk forfeits all one's sympathy and makes one think that social grace is sometimes a moral duty.

James Morris

He (Macaulay) has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

Sydney Smith

As I got warmed up and felt perfectly at home in talk I heard myself boasting lying exaggerating. Oh not deliberately far from it. It would be unconvivial and dull to stop and arrest the flow of talk and speak only after carefully considering whether I was telling the truth.

Bernard Berenson

Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.

Alfred North Whitehead

Communication is and should be hell fire and sparks as well as sweetness and light.

Aman Vivian Rakoff

The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.

Peter F Drucker

You never say a word of yourself dear Lady Grey. You have that dreadful sin of anti-egotism.

Sydney Smith

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

Dorothy Nevill

Listen or thy tongue will keep thee deaf.

American Indian proverb

People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking though even that is beyond most of our powers it means taking a vigorous human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.

Alice Duer Miller

A man who listens because he has nothing to say can hardly be a source of inspiration. The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternately absorbs and expresses ideas.

Agnes Repplier

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

Seneca

That is the happiest conversation where there is no competition no vanity but a calm quiet interchange of sentiments.

Samuel Johnson

John Wesley's conversation is good but he is never at leisure. He is always obliged to go at a certain hour. This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have his talk out as I do.

Samuel Johnson

She had lost the art of conversation but not unfortunately the power of speech.

George Bernard Shaw

Too much agreement kills a chat.

Eldridge Cleaver

You can never hope to become a skilled conversationalist until you learn how to put your foot tactfully through the television set.

M. Dale Baughman

Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.

Margaret Halsey

Conversation is the fine art of mutual consideration and communication about matters of common interest that basically have some human importance.

Ordway Tead

Great talkers are trying to fill the gap between themselves and others but only widen it.

Mason Cooley

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Robert Frost

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we have been ignorant of their value.

Buckminster Fuller

Speech is civilization itself.

Thomas Mann

The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds.

Walter Bagehot

The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively but says nothing.

Henry S. Haskins

Every person has something meaningful to say in the conversation of life.

Bryant McGill

Just because you talk about it or advocate for one position doesn't mean you care more. Just because someone doesn't talk about it and advocates a different position doesn't mean they care less.

Donna Lynn Hope

The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.

Robert Charles Wilson

But before she tells you anything." I glared at him suspiciously."your seed..."Tsaeb winced."What the hell are you talking about?""your...well, your seed. You know, you have to knock her up.

J.A. Redmerski

[I]t is things that make us happy when conversation begins to reveal itself as a paltry substitute.

Rick Moody

Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).

Christopher Hitchens

It's basically the same in all periods of societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.''And those troubling things are all you /can/ think about when you're one of the few.''That's about the size of it,' she said mournfully. 'But maybe, if you're in a situation like that, you learn to think for yourself.''Yes, but maybe what you end up thinking for yourself /about/ is all those troubling things.

Haruki Murakami

He had never imagined so clearly the consequences of mailing a letter—the impossibility of retrieving it from the iron mouth of the box; the inevitability if its steady progress through the postal system; the passing from bag to bag and postman to postman until a lone man in a van pulls up to the door and pushes a small pile through the letterbox. It seemed suddenly horrible that one's words could not be taken back, one's thoughts allowed none of the remediation of speaking face to face.

Helen Simonson

...I only told you about it because I thought I might get a laugh out of you for once even if it wasn't the truth, Jessie. Things don't have to be true to talk about 'em, you know.

Marsha Norman

In Nepal, the quality of conversation is much more important than accuracy of the content. Maybe we get overexcited about information in England?

Jane Wilson-Howarth

In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point.

Samuel Beckett

He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

Michael Chabon

There was no necessity for either to have the last word. For the first word became the only word of their romantic conversation.

David Paul Kirkpatrick

With some people there is easy conversation and not enough time in one meal to get out everything you want to tell her--all the things you didn't know you'd been holding in until you're suddenly confessing to Facebook-stalking ex-boyfriends and how nerdy you are for coveting the iPad--and with others there is that subtle but heavy weight of constantly trying to think of what you might say next to avoid an uncomfortable silence.

Rachel Bertsche

You never listen to me anymore. Before, if I was talking to you, you would always listen. But now you have no time to even talk to me.'Yeah... Has Keaty told you not to eat the Stew?''Richard!'I frowned 'What?''You are not listening to me!''… Oh. Well I'm sorry. I've got a lot on my mind.''Not me.''Huh?''I am not on your mind.''Uh... of course you are.''I am not' she poked me in the ribs. 'I think you do not love me anymore.'I looked at her in astonishment '… Are you serious?''Very serious' she said petulantly'But... I mean... do we have to talk about this right now?''Yes. It must be now. Etienne is not here, and maybe soon I will never see you agai...''Francoise!' I hissed. 'Keep it down!''Maybe I should keep it down but maybe I should not. In the dope field, when I would not be quiet, you pushed me to the ground and held me tightly'. She giggled. 'It was very exciting'.

Alex Garland

I like the way you secretly send me a direct message when we're in the middle of a conversation.

Ariel Seraphino

So you have something important to say, so you interrupt an exciting conversation already in progress just to let us know you have nothing to contribute to the discussion. Umm....

Troy Ragland

That which is worth telling is not worth having.

Raheel Farooq

one wonders how much real conversation there is when one party does not, in many districts, have to contend for the votes of minorities, and the other can only elevate minorities into positions of power when the political wind is blowing in its direction.

Garrance Franke-Ruta

Surely only boring people went in for conversations consisting of questions and answers. The art of true conversation consisted in the play of minds.

Ved Mehta

She said one thing and I said another and the next thing I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the middle of that conversation.

Hank Moody

We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.

J.D. Salinger

Weird people don't care if they're weird. They are the most entertaining to converse with because nothing is off-limits.

Donna Lynn Hope

Are you really going back there with me?" I ask."Hell yes I am. Your wish is finally coming true. I will see your vagina. Plus, I really want to see the look on that woman's face when she gets a peek at your plethora of pubes. Your copious curls, your abundant bush, the wild mane that if it sees a spark will start a forest fire," she states."Are you finished?" I ask irritably."I think so. But give me five minutes and I might be able to get one more in.

Tara Sivec

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Conversation Quotes

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