Top 100 Quotes About Eloquence
#1. Eloquence, when in its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection.
David Hume
#3. Exactness is first obtained, and afterwards elegance. But diction, merely vocal, is always in its childhood. As no man leaves his eloquence behind him, the new generations have all to learn. There may possibly be books without a polished language, but there can be no polished language without books.
Samuel Johnson
#5. You can speak with spiritual eloquence, pray in public, and maintain a holy appearance ... but it is your behavior that will reveal your true character.
Steve Maraboli
#6. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them.
Edwin H. Friedman
#7. Seldom do people discern eloquence under a threadbare cloak
Juvenal
#8. There is no talent so pernicious as eloquence to those who have it under command.
Joseph Addison
#9. A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of.
Joseph Addison
#10. Everyone in their life has his own particular way of expressing life's purpose - the lawyer his eloquence, the painter his palette, and the man of letters his pen from which the quick words of his story flow. I have my bicycle.
Gino Bartali
#11. No amount of scholastic attainment, of able and profound exposition of brilliant and stirring eloquence can atone for the absence of a deep impassioned sympathetic love for human souls.
David Brainerd
#12. Genuine laughter is true eloquence and more effective than speech
Mahatma Gandhi
#13. Language is in decline. Not only has eloquence departed but simple, direct speech as well, though pomposity and banality have not.
Edwin Newman
#14. The fact that it took the rise of democracies and otherwise open societies at Athens and elsewhere to create the climate in which public eloquence became a political indispensability.
Aristotle.
#16. Him of the western dome, whose weighty sense Flows in fit words and heavenly eloquence.
John Dryden
#17. Silence is sometimes more significant and sublime than the most noble and most expressive eloquence, and is on many occasions the indication of a great mind.
Joseph Addison
#18. Eloquence in public assemblies is not the surest road to fame and preferment, at least unless it be used with great caution, very rarely, and with great reserve.
John Adams
#19. In such business
Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th' ignorant
More learned than the ears.
William Shakespeare
#20. Eloquence wins its great and enduring fame quite as much from the benches of our opponents as from those of our friends.
Tacitus
#22. Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
Adam Gopnik
#23. They let out on hire their passions and eloquence. [Referring to lawyers.]
Martial
#24. {29:4} You will be brought low. You will speak from the ground, and your eloquence will be heard from the dirt. And, from the ground, your voice will be like that of the python, and your eloquence
The Biblescript
#25. Wait", I say. "That's-you-what?"
"That's what I love about working with you, Valchek. Your eloquence."
"But -but- but-"
"And your motorboat impressions."
"Charlie, if you were there, why didn't you arrest him?
D.D. Barant
#27. Bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate ... happens to me on a daily basis!
Edith Wharton
#28. Love leads us to write poetry because love improves our hearing; like prayer, poetry is every bit as much about listening as it is about speaking. To 'get' the poem is to hear the eloquence of the silence that it calls forth through its manifestation of love.
David Patterson
#30. It is true that despite occasional gleams of Churchillian eloquence he [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] usually spoke poorly. He was far more effective in conversations a deux. But those who dismiss him as shallow because his rhetoric was fustian err.
William Manchester
#31. Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
Kurt Vonnegut
#32. Eloquence which does not startle I don't consider eloquence. CICERO, LETTER TO BRUTUS, 48 B.C.
Robert Harris
#33. Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at birth. Eloquence may set fire to reason.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#34. The purpose of education is to teach a defense against eloquence.
Bertrand Russell
#36. No words suffice the secret soul to show, For truth denies all eloquence to woe.
Lord Byron
#37. I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults overthe moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#38. Eloquence is an engine invented to manage and wield at will the fierce democracy, and, like medicine to the sick, is only employed in the paroxysms of a disordered state.
Michel De Montaigne
#39. Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
Iris Murdoch
#40. It cannot reasonably be doubted, but a little miss, dressed in a new gown for a dancing-school ball, receives as complete enjoyment as the greatest orator, who triumphs in the splendour of his eloquence, while he governs the passions and resolutions of a numerous assembly.
David Hume
#42. Persuasive speech, and more persuasive sighs, Silence that spoke and eloquence of eyes.
Homer
#43. In pulpit eloquence, the grand difficulty lies here
to give the subject all the dignity it so fully deserves, without attaching any importance to ourselves. The Christian messenger cannot think too highly of his prince, nor too humbly of himself.
Charles Caleb Colton
#45. Since Kennedy's death, the nation has not seen, in any of his successors, his cosmopolitan intellectualism or the oratorical eloquence with which he sought to lead the nation by the power of his words.
Vincent Bugliosi
#46. The truth is mightier than eloquence, the Spirit greater than genius, faith more than education.
Martin Luther
#49. But listen to me first and swear an oath to use all your eloquence and strength to look after me and protect me.
Homer
#50. No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity.
Joseph Conrad
#52. Nature at times adds her own commentary to our actions with a kind of somber and considered eloquence, as though she were bidding us reflect.
Victor Hugo
#53. The worshipful father and first founder and embellisher of ornate eloquence in our English, I mean Master Geoffrey Chaucer.
William Caxton
#54. Pow'r above pow'rs!
O heavenly eloquence!
That with the strong rein of commanding words,
Dost manage, guide, and master th' eminence
Of men's affections, more than all their swords!
Samuel Daniel
#55. Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
#56. A conquering army on the border will not be stopped by eloquence.
Otto Von Bismarck
#57. He adorned whatever subject he either spoke or wrote upon, by the most splendid eloquence.
Lord Chesterfield
#58. Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.
Mark Twain
#59. The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of the Russian poets such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky - oppositional figures who could draw crowds. The Russian poets recited from memory as a matter of course.
James Fenton
#60. Let me sit here, on the threshold of two worlds. Lost in the eloquence of silence.
Jalaluddin Rumi
#61. The hearts of men are their books; events are their tutors; great actions are their eloquence.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#62. Curran grinned and my heart made a little jump. I didn't expect that.
"That's it? That's your witty comeback?"
"Yep." Eloquence 'R' Us. When in trouble, keep it monosyllabic - safer that way.
Ilona Andrews
#63. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.
Stephen King
#64. Shame on all eloquence which leaves us with a taste for itself and not for its substance.
Michel De Montaigne
#65. Eloquence is the art of saying as little as possible but making it sound as much as possible.
Evan Esar
#66. The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.
Orson Welles
#67. He was created of a mother whom He created. He was carried by hands that He formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy. He, the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute.
Saint Augustine
#68. The one, more Latin, more Roman, closer to eloquence than to the literal word, aims at a certain effect, at magic. The other, more Greek, more Hellenistic, seeks transparency flowing from the source.
Therese De Lisieux
#70. A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#72. She had this way, when she wasn't talking about foreign politics or global warming, of making sense of all the complex things I never knew how to describe.
Julie Murphy
#73. It's good to keep in mind that prominence is always a mix of hard work, eloquence in your practice, good timing and fortuitous social relations. Everything can't be personalized.
Barbara Kruger
#74. The nature of our constitution makes eloquence more useful and more necessary in this country than in any other in Europe.
Bill Vaughan
#75. poets. have
the toughest job
in the universe-
of turning silence
into eloquence.
Sanober Khan
#76. The less there is of eloquence, the more there is of love.
Charles Perrault
#77. An orator of past times declared that his calling was to make small things appear to be grand.
Michel De Montaigne
#78. Let us never forget that, to be profited, that is, to be spiritually improved in knowledge, faith, holiness, joy and love, is the end of hearing sermons, and not merely to have our taste gratified by genius, eloquence and oratory.
John Angell James
#79. The gusto of one, the indignation of the other; the challenge of the one party, the response of the other; the eloquence and the comedy, the passion and the issues were ours-no other country can provide them.
Theodore White
#82. Eloquence is the child of knowledge. When a mind is full, like a wholesome river, it is also clear.
Benjamin Disraeli
#83. I have carefully and regularly perused the Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume contains more sublimity, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains of eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever language they may have been written.
William Jones
#84. Do not be deceived by a man's eloquence; rather whoever fulfils trusts and refrains from impugning people's honour is a real man.
Umar
#85. Who thinks his great achievements poor
Shall find his vigour long endure.
Of greatest fulness, deemed a void,
Exhaustion ne'er shall stem the tide.
Do thou what's straight still crooked deem;
Thy greatest art still stupid seem,
And eloquence a stammering scream.
Lao-Tzu
#86. I can never bring you to realise the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#87. Thare is no chance of hurrying bussiness here like in the legeslature of a State thare is such a desposition here to Show Eloquence that this will be a long Session and do no good ...
Davy Crockett
#88. Creative expression requires an ability to work with feelings and channel them. Frustration, dissatisfaction, and even a sense of desperation may help you access an eloquence you never knew existed.
Shaun McNiff
#89. Our common future is badly served when the eloquence of our attack on the other fellow exceeds the energy with which we cooperate with them.
Clarence Francis
#90. Love, understood by all, will be pouring forth its unconscious eloquence.
Henry Drummond
#91. And how moving is the eloquence of the untaught when it is the heart that is speaking!
Mark Twain
#92. And stature commanding and exact - in intellect richly endowed - in natural eloquence a prodigy - in soul manifestly "created but a little lower than the angels" - yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave, - trembling for his safety, hardly daring to believe
Frederick Douglass
#93. O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.
William Shakespeare
#94. My wife has been my greatest earthly inspiration. She excels in eloquence, the poetry of words, empathy and graciousness.
George W. Romney
#95. Eloquence, at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection, but addresses itself entirely to the desires and affections, captivating the willing hearers, and subduing their understanding.
David Hume
#96. Eloquence; it requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true.
Blaise Pascal
#98. To lose one's health renders science null, are inglorious, strength unavailing, wealth useless, and eloquence powerless.
Herophilos
#100. Indeed, there is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted.
Edgar Allan Poe
