Joshua Reynolds Quotes

I'm not good at throwing around rhetoric.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things.

If you're a preacher, you talk for a living, so even if you don't make sense, you learn to make nonsense eloquently.

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.

The writing is all done, so it's all about verbalizing everything from point A to point B, and certainly there's a bit of politics involved, so it's a different thing.

An orator is the worse person to tell a plain fact.

A great speech is literature.

I'm an orator, a raconteur.

Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

It really is true that an orator is simply a good man who speaks well.

A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.

Great is our admiration of the orator who speaks with fluency and discretion.

To speak and to speak well, are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

Talking and eloquence are not the same.

I often begin a thought with spirit and finish it with nonsense. The chain of my argument often escapes me, and when lost can seldom be retrieved. These faults are so overpowering that I should sink into perpetual silence were it not that sometimes in ardor of debate, when my feelings are wound up to a high tone, elocution pours itself along with unusual rapidity, and I have passages which would not shame a good speaker; this is the only thing that makes me tolerable to others or to myself.

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of any more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage superior to the speech of Logan

I'm not very articulate. I don't have that skill.

Speech is the best show a man puts on.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

Making clever speeches takes a lot of work and a lot of time.