Loquacity Quotes & Sayings

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur. — Martin Amis

Loquacity with tongue or pen is its own reward
or, punishment. — George Eliot

But far more numerous was the herd of such,
Who think too little, and who talk too much. — John Dryden

A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never. — Henry Ward Beecher

[W]e talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on state occassions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words. — Charles Dickens

The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased loquacity on their return. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

One learns taciturnity best among people without it, and loquacity among the taciturn. — Jean Paul Richter

Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell. — Charles Dickens

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The modesty and diffidence that the penniless, unemployed Standish had brought aboard were now no longer to be seen; and the assurance of a monthly income and a settled position had developed a displeasing and often didactic loquacity. He was also, of course, incompetent. — Patrick O'Brian

Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass. — Elizabeth Hardwick

The couple sat side by side on cushions on the floor, quietly eating breakfast from the low table. They munched in happy and enjoyable silence, of the kind that grows like a vine through the long years of a good marriage, so that when everything that needs to be said has already been pronounced, it is mutually understood that there is an intimate silence that has its own loquacity. — Louis De Bernieres

The folk of a Celtic type, whether pre-Celtic, Celtic, or Norse, have all spoken a Celtic language and exhibit the same old Celtic characteristics - vanity, loquacity, excitability, fickleness, imagination, love of the romantic, fidelity, attachment to family ties, sentimental love of their country, religiosity passing over easily to superstition, and a comparatively high degree of sexual morality. — John Arnott MacCulloch

Try to be brief, will you, Tru?" Tse-Mallory asked his companion. "If there is one among us who is guilty of persistent loquacity," came the reply smoothly, "it is not I." "Debatable" was Tse-Mallory's simple retort, as he followed September up the steps leading out of the temple. "Not without being guilty of the crime of debating!" shouted Truzenzuzex, — Alan Dean Foster

The qualities of character can be arranged in triads, in each of which the first and last qualities will be extremes and vices, and the middle quality a virtue or an excellence. So between cowardice and rashness is courage; between stinginess and extravagance is liberality; between sloth and greed is ambition; between humility and pride is modesty; between secrecy and loquacity, honesty; between moroseness and buffoonery, good humor; between quarrelsomeness and flattery, friendship; between Hamlet's indecisiveness and Quixote's impulsiveness is self-control.49 "Right," then, in ethics or conduct, is not different from "right" in mathematics or engineering; it means correct, fit, what works best to the best result. The — Will Durant

Loquacity storms the ear, but modesty takes the heart. — Robert South

Dirk was, for one of the few times in a life of exuberantly prolific loquacity, wordless. — Douglas Adams

You know you haven't stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. — Groucho Marx

If there are two definitive features of ancient Greek civilization, they are loquacity and competition. — Aristotle.

After one of the lectures in Philadelphia, a woman asked Chesterton what made women talk so much, to which he replied, briefly, 'God, Madam'. — Ian T. Ker

Surely in much talk there cannot choose but be much vanity. Loquacity is the fistula of the mind,
ever-running and almost incurable, let every man, therefore, be a Phocion or Pythagorean, to speak briefly to the point or not at all; let him labor like them of Crete, to show more wit in his discourse than words, and not to pour out of his mouth a flood of the one, when he can hardly wring out of his brains a drop of the other. — Herbert Spencer

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact. — George Eliot

The part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. — William James

His picturesque and filthy loquacity flowed like a troubled stream from a poisoned source. — Joseph Conrad

Loquacity, n. A disorder which renders the sufferer unable to curb his tongue when you wish to talk. — Ambrose Bierce

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing. — William S. Burroughs

All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth. — Michel De Montaigne