Quotes about Communication

Because it is address, attending always on the response of the addressed, infinite speech has the form of listening. Infinite speech does not end in the obedient silence of the hearer, but continues by way of the attentive silence of the speaker. It is not a silence into which speech has died, but a silence from which speech is born.

If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

Since a culture is not anything persons do, but anything they do with each other, we may say that a culture comes into being whenever persons choose to be a people. It is as a people that they arrange their rules with each other, their moralities, their modes of communication.

I always have a quotation for everything--it saves original thinking.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

I will say here and now that I have never discovered, nor can I see, any reasonable use or excuse for the " waynee, weedee, weekee " convention. It is not merely that I have a profound sympathy with one of my friends who says he just cannot believe that Caesar was the kind of man to talk in that kind of way. Caesar may, indeed, have done so, but what then ?

And by the way, my dear,' he said, 'you might just mention to Mrs. Sutton that if she must read the morning paper before I come down, I should be obliged if she would fold it neatly afterwards.' 'What an old fuss-box you are, darling,' said his wife. Mr. Mummery sighed. He could not explain that it was somehow important that the morning paper should come to him fresh and prim, like a virgin. Women did not feel these things. (Suspicion)

Peter: Oy! Harriet: Hullo! Peter: I just wanted to ask whether you'd given any further thought to that suggestion about marrying me. Harriet (sarcastically) : I suppose you were thinking how delightful it would be to go through life together like this? Peter: Well, not quite like this. Hand in hand was more my idea. Harriet: What is that in your hand? Peter: A dead starfish. Harriet: Poor fish! Peter: No ill-feeling, I trust? Harriet: Oh, dear no.

The whole question is extraordinarily complicated because of the gulf that has grown up between art on the one hand and on the other hand both the Church and secular society, so that the artists tend to be out of touch with the common man, while the latter, whether Christian or not, has only a very fumbling critical judgment to rely on.

He spoke in a series of gruff barks, and held himself so rigidly that if he had swallowed a poker it could only have produced unseemly curves and flexions in his figure.

Discretion plays a major part in making up the salesman's art, for truths that no one can believe are calculated to deceive.

Men of science spend much time and effort in the attempt to disentangle words from their metaphorical and traditional associations;