Speak No Evil - Words and Speech

Whoso keepeth his mouth and his tongue keepeth his soul from troubles. (Prov 21:23)

A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control. (Prov 29:11)

It's bad manners to talk when your mouth is full and your head is empty.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. (Plato, Dialogues)

The best thing to do when you are angry is to close your mouth.

To get the best of an argument, stay out of it.

A dog has many friends because he wags his tail instead of his tongue.

'Twas a thief said the last kind word to Christ; Christ took the kindness and forgave the theft. (R. Browning, "The Ring and the Book")

Talk low, talk slow, and don't talk too much. (John Wayne on the Secret of Success)

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. (Plato)

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days. (Garrison Keillor)

Missles of ligneous or petrous consistency have the potential of fracturing my gaseous structure, however appellations will eternal remain innocuous. (Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.)

A compliment is a statement of an agreeable truth; flattery is a statement of an agreeable untruth. (Sir John A. MacDonald)

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it. (James Russell Lowell)

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't. (Erica Jong)

You should be careful when you give advice, because someone might take it.

Yawning is usually the act of a person inadvertently opening his mouth when he wishes others would shut theirs.

It is useless to hold a person to anything he says while he's in love, drunk, or running for office. (Shirley MacLaine)

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do. (Dale Carnegie)

Don't use a gallon of speech to express a spoonful of thought.

A fool's tongue is always long enough to cut his own throat.

It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt. (Mark Twain)

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. (Ernest Hemingway)

No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut. (Sam Rayburn)

Flattery is the art of telling people exactly what they think of themselves.

Light travels faster than sound. Is that why some people appear bright until you hear them speak?

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. (Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself")

Why is it the people who know the least know it the loudest?

Stuffed fish on wall:  "If I had kept my mouth shut I wouldn't be here."

When we ask advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice. (Joseph-Louis LaGrange)

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.  But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.  (Samuel Lover)

Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
(Alexander Pope)

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round. (David Lodge)

'The time has come,' the Walrus said,
'To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -
Of cabbages - and kings.'
(Lewis Carroll)

Speech is civilisation itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact - it is silence which isolates. (Thomas Mann)

What is it to thee what they whisper there? Come after me and let the people talk. (Dante Alighieri)

In classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke', but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, 'Let us march.' (Adlai Stevenson)

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. (Rudyard Kipling)