~LANGUAGE~

THE ABSENCE OF IT:  SILENCE

"Sticks and stones are hard on bones.
  Aimed with angry art,
  Words can sting like anything.
  But silence breaks the heart." ~Phyllis McGinley

"Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right." ~Igor Stravinsky

"I could tell it but just because I won't tell it but bury it in deep silence I can tell a lot else." ~Soren Kierkegaard

"Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute." ~Josh Billings

"Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time." ~Thomas Carlyle, Ibid

"Of those who say nothing, few are silent." ~Thomas Neill

"Silence is exhilirating at first--as noise is--but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep." ~Edward Hoagland

"Silence is argument carried out by other means." ~Ernesto "Che" Guevara

GOSSIP

"How can we expect another to keep our secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves?" ~Francois Duc De La Rochefaucauld

"Someone who gossips well has a reputation for being good company or even a wit, never for being a gossip." ~Louis Kronenberger

LISTENING

"No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you will see why." ~Mignon McLaughlin

"If speaking is silver, then listening is gold." ~Turkish Proverb

"I think I'll learn more from listening. Anything I would say I already know."  ~unknown (quoted in Christian Science Monitor)

"We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak." ~Epictetus

"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." ~Ernest Hemingway

"Yes, I can hear you, a deaf man could hear you." ~History of the World Part I

"No man would listen to you talk if he didn't know it was his turn next." ~Edgar Watson Howe

TALKING

"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." ~Marshall McLuhan

"Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep." ~Albert Camus

"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools because the have to say something." ~Plato

"If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind, give it more thought." ~Dennis Roch

"It's better to keep your mouth shut and give the impression that you're stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." ~Rami Belson

"Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent." ~Napoleon Bonaparte

"Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time." ~Thomas Carlyle, Ibid

"Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience." ~Bill Watterson,
Calvin and Hobbes (Calvin)

"The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company." ~Oscar Wilde

"I prefer talking with old women who deal in family twaddle, next with lunatics--and last of all with people who are extremely sensible." ~Soren Kierkegaard

"The best time to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust." ~Josh Billings

"When you have nothing to say, say nothing." ~Charles Caleb Colton

"The human brain is like a TV set. When it goes blank, it's time to turn off the sound." ~Pat Elphinstone

"Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in!" ~H. R. Haldeman

IN GENERAL

"Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?" ~Clarence Darrow

"It's lucky that language has a number of expressions for balderdash and nonsense. If it didn't, I'd go mad. For what would that prove except that everything people say is gibberish? It's lucky that language is so cultivated in this respect, since that means one can still hope to hear rational discourse occasionally." ~Soren Kierkegaard

"The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars." ~Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

"I may not be so very wide of the mark if I say: man is a nonsense--and that it is with the help of language that he is so.  Throught language everyone participates in the highest--but participating in the highest through language in the sense of merely talking about the highest is just as ironical as being a spectator of the royal dinner -table from the gallery." ~Soren Kierkegaard

"Language distinguishes man from the beast--but perhaps the dumb beast still has the advantage, for at least it is not cheated, nor cheats itself, out of the highest." ~Soren Kierkegaard

FOREIGN LANGUAGES

"Next to taking off all my clothes, owning nothing in the world, not the least thing, and then throwing myself into the water, I find most pleasure in speaking a foreign language, preferably a living one, in order to become entfremdet(estranged) from myself." ~Soren Kierkegaard