Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

We need to become more acutely conscious that words matter. None of us would deny that ideas and opinions matter, but we can sometimes be careless about how we express them. The words we choose to advance an idea, opinion, or point of view have a huge impact on how people react and respond to that view. When we use hyperbole, we increase the chances of being misunderstood and of promoting equally exaggerated counter-reactions, especially when people are reacting almost instantaneously.

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

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.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

A great speech is literature.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Talking and eloquence are not the same.

Words become deeds and then meet needs.

Some eloquence is like a magic.

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.

Everything has been said but not everyone has yet said it.

By words the mind is winged.

I [Moses] am not a man of words.

As reason is the glory of man, so the lamp of reason is eloquence.

Words are slippery and thoughts are vicious.

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

Accent [emphasis] is the soul of speech; it gives it feeling and truth.

Kennedy understood something that is not so obvious, and that is that words are more important than deeds. You can’t govern 300 million people—or 180 million when Kennedy was president—by doing things. You can only do it by rhetoric.

An orator is a man who says what he thinks and feels what he says.

Here comes the orator with his flood of words and his drop or reason.

I'm not good at throwing around rhetoric.

I am by nature a dealer in words, and words are the most powerful drug known to humanity.