Communication Quotes
Shakespeare leads, then Marshall McLuhan, Homer, Molière and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is the one to read for sources. The Tractatus (1922) has the limits of my language meaning the limits of my world, and The Blue Book (1931) reminds us that we do not use language according to strict rules, since it was not taught to us by means of strict rules. Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1779) has the shortest version of the page’s theme: language is the dress of thought.
Two entries carry flags. “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place” is credited to George Bernard Shaw and marked misattributed. “I have often regretted my speech, never my silence” is credited to Publilius Syrus and disputed.
Most quoted on communication:
And don’t confound the language of the nation
With long-tailed words in osity and ation.
The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
Your fair discourse hath been as sugar,
Making the hard way sweet and delectable.
In the pleading of cases nothing pleases so much as brevity.
Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.
Good communication is stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
When we are understood, we always speak well, and then all your fine diction serves no purpose.
The accent of one's country dwells in the mind and in the heart as much as in the language.
Accent is the soul of a language; it gives the feeling and truth to it.
Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach
Of ordinary men.
He replies nothing but monosyllables. I believe he would make three bites of a cherry.