Eloquence Quotes

1. "{When Abraham Lincoln was 26 years old in 1835, he wrote a defense of Thomas Paine's deism; a political associate, Samuel Hill, burned it to save Lincoln's political career. Historian Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln's papers, said Paine had a strong influence on Lincoln's style:}No other writer of the eighteenth century, with the exception of Jefferson, parallels more closely the temper or gist of Lincoln's later thought. In style, Paine above all others affords the variety of eloquence which, chastened and adapted to Lincoln's own mood, is revealed in Lincoln's formal writings."
Author: Abraham Lincoln

2. "Silence is eternal eloquence"
Author: Alain Badan

3. "From the time when the exercise of the intellect became a source of strength and of wealth, we see that every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea became a germ of power placed within the reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the graces of the mind, the fire of imagination, depth of thought, and all the gifts which Heaven scatters at a venture turned to the advantage of democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by throwing into bold relief the natural greatness of man. Its conquests spread, therefore, with those of civilization and knowledge; and literature became an arsenal open to all, where the poor and the weak daily resorted for arms."
Author: Alexis De Tocqueville

4. "Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things."
Author: Ben Jonson

5. "To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy."
Author: Bertrand Russell

6. "Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts."
Author: Blaise Pascal

7. "The gospel is preached in the ears of all men; it only comes with power to some. The power that is in the gospel does not lie in the eloquence of the preacher otherwise men would be converters of souls. Nor does it lie in the preacher's learning; otherwise it could consists of the wisdom of men. We might preach till our tongues rotted, till we should exhaust our lungs and die, but never a soul would be converted unless there were mysterious power going with it – the Holy Ghost changing the will of man. O Sirs! We might as well preach to stone walls as preach to humanity unless the Holy Ghost be with the word, to give it power to convert the soul."
Author: Charles H. Spurgeon

8. "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?"
Author: D.D. Barant

9. "The finest eloquence is that which gets things done."
Author: David Lloyd George

10. "Fucking fuck fuck of a fuck." Shame dug in his pocket for his cigarettes and lighter. His hands shook as he lit up. "Eloquence, thy name is Flynn," Terric said"
Author: Devon Monk

11. "This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet's living billions."
Author: Don DeLillo

12. "He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate."
Author: Edith Wharton

13. "Yet, with all that, no one dared to interfere. Burke had exhausted all his eloquence in trying to induce the British Government to fight the revolutionary government of France, but Mr. Pitt, with characteristic prudence, did not feel that this country was fit yet to embark on another arduous and costly war. It was for Austria to take the initiative; Austria, whose fairest daughter was even now a dethroned queen, imprisoned and insulted by a howling mob; surely 'twas not—so argued Mr. Fox—for the whole of England to take up arms, because one set of Frenchmen chose to murder another."
Author: Emmuska Orczy

14. "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"
Author: Frederick Douglass

15. "Kindness has converted more sinners than zeal, eloquence, or learning."
Author: Frederick William Faber

16. "He bantered us, challenged us, electrified us . . . At times his eloquence held us silent as images and some witty turn, some humorous phrase brought roars of applause. At times we cheered almost every sentence, like delegates at a political convention, At other moments we rose in our seats and yelled. There was something hypnotic in his rhythm and phrasing. His power over his auditors was absolute.{Garland's thoughts on the great Robert Ingersoll}"
Author: He

17. "What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

18. "He looks at Norris, exasperated. He seems to think that with eloquence, with sincerity, with frankness, he can change what is happening. The whole court has seen him slobbering over the queen. How could he expect to go shopping with his eyes, and finger the goods no doubt, and not have an account to settle at the end of it?"
Author: Hilary Mantel

19. "But listen to me first and swear an oath to use all your eloquence and strength to look after me and protect me."
Author: Homer

20. "However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot's voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will?"
Author: Honoré De Balzac

21. "Yep." Eloquence 'R' Us. When in trouble, keep it monosyllabic—safer that way."
Author: Ilona Andrews

22. "In her fevered eloquence she loses herself in detail, mixes up things that happened yesterday with others that happened long ago, imagined things with others that are true or half true, and if I manage to refute one charge, she comes at me with another one that I've refuted three times already. It's as if someone, in ignorance of the pattern on the front side of a rug, were picking at loose threads on the back, and with a sore finger".From My First Wife, Jakob Wasser Mann"
Author: Jakob Wasser Mann

23. "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."
Author: John Adams

24. "I was always exceedingly delighted with that saying of Chrysostom, "The foundation of our philosophy is humility"; and yet more pleased with that of Augustine: "As the orator, when asked, What is the first precept in eloquence? answered, Delivery: What is the second? Delivery: What is the third? Delivery: so if you ask me concerning the precepts of the Christian religion, I will answer, first, second, and third, Humility."
Author: John Calvin

25. "Of the modern critics, although I disagree with almost everything she says, I admire Mary McCarthy's eloquence and social observation in 'Sights and Spectacles'; she thinks in print, but she doesn't have a real feel for the stage."
Author: John Lahr

26. "Why,' I said, quite surprised by my own eloquence in inventing all this stuff, 'it happens every day. The old old story. Boys and girls fall in love, that is, they are driven mad and go blind and deaf and see each other not as human animals with comic noses and bandy legs and voices like frogs, but as angels so full of shining goodness that like hollow turnips with candles put into them, they seem miracles of beauty. And the next minute the candles shoot out sparks and burn their eyes. And they seem to each other like devils, full of spite and cruelty. And they will drive each other mad unless they have grown some imagination. Even enough to laugh."
Author: Joyce Cary

27. "Who thinks his great achievements poorShall 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."
Author: Lao Tzu

28. "Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech."
Author: Martin Farquhar Tupper

29. "From you, my dear Erasmus, let me obtain this request, that just as I bear with your ignorance in these matters, so you in turn will bear with my lack of eloquence."
Author: Martin Luther

30. "These words of yours, devoid of Christ, devoid of Spirit, are colder than ice itself, so that they tarnish the beauty of your eloquence. Perhaps they were dragged out of you, poor fellow, by fear of the pontiffs and tyrants, lest you should seem altogether an atheist!"
Author: Martin Luther

31. "I was at first touched by the expressions of his misery; yet, when I called to mind what Frankenstein had said of his powers of eloquence and persuasion, and when I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of my friend, indignation was rekindled within me. "Wretch!" I said, "it is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings; and when they are consumed you sit among the ruins and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend! if he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be the object, again would he become the prey, of your accursed vengeance. It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power."
Author: Mary Shelley

32. "I may be deprived of eloquence, but my mind can never be a dumb."
Author: Michael Bassey Johnson

33. "I think public intellectuals have a responsibility - to be self-critical on the one hand, to do serious, nuanced work rigorously executed; but to also be able to get off those perches and out of those ivory towers and speak to the real people who make decisions; to speak truth to power and the powerless with lucidity and eloquence."
Author: Michael Eric Dyson

34. "The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society."
Author: Nicolas Chamfort

35. "Every idea is an incitement... eloquence may set fire to reason."
Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

36. "Take eloquence and wring its neck."
Author: Paul Verlaine

37. "Courage easily finds its own eloquence."
Author: Plautus

38. "In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary."
Author: Robert Fitzgerald

39. "Be helpless, dumbfounded,Unable to say yes or no.Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up.We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.If we say we can, we're lying.If we say No, we don't see it,That No will behead usAnd shut tight our window onto spirit.So let us rather not be sure of anything,Beside ourselves, and only that, soMiraculous beings come running to help.Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,We shall be saying finally,With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,We shall be a mighty kindness."
Author: Rumi

40. "Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn."
Author: Seneca

41. "Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us."
Author: Stephen King

42. "For to accuse requires less eloquence, such is man's nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution, more resembles justice."
Author: Thomas Hobbes

43. "I breathed him in and tasted him, his lips stronger than I'd expected. He could spout scripture and I could spout poetry, but none could come close to the eloquence made manifest in the kiss."
Author: Vee Hoffman

44. "The soldier—that is, the great soldier—of to-day is not a romantic animal, dashing at forlorn hopes, animated by frantic sentiment, full of fancies as to a love-lady or a sovereign; but a quiet, grave man, busied in charts, exact in sums, master of the art of tactics, occupied in trivial detail; thinking, as the Duke of Wellington was said to do, most of the shoes of his soldiers; despising all manner of èclat and eloquence; perhaps, like Count Moltke, ‘silent in seven languages'."
Author: Walter Bagehot

45. "Eloquence is the poetry of prose."
Author: William C. Bryant

46. "As an unperfect actor upon the stageWho with much fear is put besides his partOr some fierce thing, replete with too much rageWhose strengths abundance weakens his own heartSo I, for fear of trust, forget to sayThe perfect ceremony of love's riteAnd in mine own love's strength seem to decayO'ercharged with burthen of my own love's mighto, let my books be then the eloquenceAnd dumb presagers of my speaking breastWho plead for love, and look for recompenseMore than that tongue that more hath express'd.O, learn to read what silent love hath writTo hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit."
Author: William Shakespeare

47. "You have witchcraft in your lips, there is more eloquence in a sugar touch of them than in the tongues of the French council; and they shouldsooner persuade Harry of England than a general petition of monarchs."
Author: William Shakespeare

48. "Action is eloquence."
Author: William Shakespeare

49. "In such businessAction is eloquence, and the eyes of th' ignorantMore learned than the ears."
Author: William Shakespeare

50. "He spoke with more eloquence than wisdom."
Author: Winston Churchill

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