Extemporaneous Quotes & Sayings

It is a fanatical notion that we interfere with the Holy Spirit if we make any preparation for prayer. The theological deficit in that assumption is that the Holy Spirit would not have us reason or use foresight or imagination or fit language. It assumes incorrectly that the only part of us that the Spirit wishes to work through is emotive impulsivity and spontaneous feeling-flow. It assumes incorrectly that the Holy Spirit does not also work through discipline, reason, reflection, and organization. — Thomas C. Oden

Evangelical preaching was also characterized by the extemporaneous interlacing of biblical passages with descriptive evangelical terminology that was designed to awaken people emotionally to their sins and cause them to tremble, shed tears, and fall to the ground. — Grant H. Palmer

Boswell's Johnson is the word made flesh ... an extemporaneous man talking himself into the thick of every occasion (in a world ofoccasions if nothing else) and therefore no monument at all but all that can be saved of a man alive in the pages of a book. — Marvin Mudrick

There is a documentary element in my films, a very strong documentary element, but by documentary element, I mean an element that's out of control, that's not controlled by me. And that element is the words, the language that people use, what they say in an interview. They're not written, not rehearsed. It's spontaneous, extemporaneous material. People — Errol Morris

I consider myself a pretty good extemporaneous speaker. Even though I don't like speaking in front of people, I don't think I'm bad at it. — Anna D. Shapiro

For correct writing, the cultivation of patience and mental accuracy is essential. Throughout the young author's period of apprenticeship, he must keep reliable dictionaries and textbooks at his elbow; eschewing as far as possible that hasty extemporaneous manner of writing which is the privilege of more advanced students. — H.P. Lovecraft

Extemporaneous and oral harangues will always have this advantage over those that are read from a in manuscript: every burst of eloquence or spark of genius they may contain, however studied they may have been beforehand, will appear to the audience to be the effect of the sudden inspiration of talent. — Charles Caleb Colton

The life of a wise man is most of all extemporaneous, for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time. — Henry David Thoreau

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. — Abraham Lincoln

I cannot write a speech. The pen is an extinguisher upon my mind and a torture to my nerves. I am the most habitual extemporaneous speaker that I have ever known. — Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II

Remarkably, [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein was reading her statement. So her mare's-nest of inapposite words and unclear thoughts cannot be excused as symptoms of Biden's Disease, that form of logorrhea that causes victims, such as Sen. Joe Biden, to become lost on the syntactical back roads of their extemporaneous rhetoric. — George Will