Quotes about Conversation

I addressed my self as one would speak to a companion with whom one is voyaging to the North Pole.

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.

The human frame being what it is, heart, body, and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes. We are all

Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly trained in promoting men's talk without listening to it, could think—about the education of children, about the use of fog sirens in an opera—without betraying herself. Only it struck Helen that Rachel was perhaps too still for a hostess, and that she might have done something with her hands.

So I says "My dear if you could give me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head I should better understand your affairs." And we had the tea and the affairs too....

Among these, accordingly, much discoursing with spirits went on - and it did a world of good which never became manifest.

But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discourse with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter.

You are a little low this evening, Frederick,' said the Father of the Marshalsea. 'Anything the matter?

If I could have known Cicero, and been his friend, and talked with him in his retirement at Tusculum (beau-ti-ful Tusculum l), I could have died contented.

If you ask, "What is the use of praying?" I answer, "Woe is me if I do not pray!" I pray on the principle that wine knocks the cork out of a bottle. There is an inward fermentation, and there must be a vent somewhere. I pray because it is easier to pray than not to pray. It is the soul that prays first: the tongue wags afterwards. It is no small privilege that we have of talking with God, and of laying our troubles upon him so as to feel relieved of them.

Women have to be active listeners and interrupters - but when you interrupt, you have to know what you are talking about.

If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.