Speak Out Your Thoughts Quotes & Sayings

Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.
Use dusky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.
Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,
As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,
And out of their droning sibilants makes
A serenade. — Wallace Stevens

The exchange of thoughts is a condition necessary for all love, all friendship and all real dialogue. Two men who can speak together can enrich and broaden themselves indefinitely. — Jorge Luis Borges

When someone refuses to speak, those around him are left to imagine what his thoughts might be, and all too often the possibilities conjured up are not pleasant ones ... Sometimes, no matter how much you wish to proclaim them, it is better to keep your thoughts to yourself. Speaking out when someone else is silent puts the speaker at a disadvantage. — Cameron Dokey

But you must be awash in a sea of compliments, my lady. Every gentleman you meet must voice his admiration, his wish to make love to you. And those are only the ones who may voice such thoughts. All about you are men who cannot speak their admiration, who must remain mute from lack of social standing or fear of offending you. Only their thoughts light the air about you, following you like a trail of perfume, heady but invisible. (Winter Makepeace) — Elizabeth Hoyt

To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak, or ... to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends. We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds. — William F. Buckley Jr.

I like solitude. It is when you truly hear and speak your natural, unadulterated mind, and out comes your most stupid self as well as your most intelligent self. It is when you realize who you are and the extents of the good and the evils which you are capable of. — Criss Jami

Ivanov: I am a bad, pathetic and worthless individual. One needs to be pathetic, too, worn out and drained by drink, like Pasha, to be still fond of me and to respect me. My God, how I despise myself! I so deeply loathe my voice, my walk, my hands, these clothes, my thoughts. Well, isn't that funny, isn't that shocking? Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, I was cheerful, tireless, passionate, I worked with these very hands, I could speak to move even Philistines to tears, I could cry when I saw grief, I became indignant when I encountered evil. I knew inspiration, I knew the charm and poetry of quiet nights when from dusk to dawn you sit at your desk or indulge you mind with dreams. I believed, I looked into the future as into the eyes of my own mother ... And now, my God, I am exhausted, I do not believe, I spend my days and nights in idleness. — Anton Chekhov

To speak truth, sir, I don't understand you at all: I cannot keep up the conversation, because it has got out of my depth. Only one thing I know: you said you were not as good as you should like to be, and that you regretted your own imperfection
one thing I can comprehend: you intimated that to have a sullied memory was a perpetual bane. It seems to me, that if you tried hard, you would in time find it possible to become what you yourself would approve; and that if from this day you began with resolution to correct your thoughts and actions, you would in a few years have laid up a new and stainless store of recollections, to which you might revert with pleasure. — Charlotte Bronte

Every writer on this planet THINKS he is a great writer (why waste your entire life writing when you believe you are mediocre?) but its deemed socially unacceptable to actually speak out such thoughts. So, modesty is always a public concept and not an inner one. For that reason alone 'modesty' can actually be said to be the product of a large ego, for the ego is primarily concerned with survival and society rewards this dishonesty and tends to punish honesty (see Camus) — Martijn Benders

Then Peter said to Jesus, "Explain to us the parable that says people aren't defiled by what they eat." 16 "Don't you understand yet?" Jesus asked. 17 "Anything you eat passes through the stomach and then goes into the sewer. 18 But the words you speak come from the heart - that's what defiles you. 19 For from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, all sexual immorality, theft, lying, and slander. 20 These are what defile you. Eating with unwashed hands will never defile you. — Anonymous

Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, grieves, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations
all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down. — Henri Frederic Amiel

Let your thoughts run free, as if your mind is taking a leisurely Sunday afternoon walk through a garden in spring bloom.
I stand in the hallway, mute. Alone. I realize: I must develop the ability to go the distance rather than just envy it.
Don't speak unless you can improve on silence
The truth is never as interesting as what people whisper about them
It's because the dream is so perfect that I can walk away from it
That blackness brought me out of the nightmare and into this morning's light — Rachel Cohn

Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one's say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression ... My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one's deepest thoughts to another. — Rollo May

George Orwell, on how to avoid thinking when you speak:
You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. they will construct your sentences for you
even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent
and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear ...
It does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this, is that it is easy. — George Orwell

With the help of the Holy Ghost, we can watch over ourselves. We can pray to recognize and reject the first thoughts of sin. We can pray to recognize a warning not to speak words which would hurt or tempt someone else. And we can, when we must, pray for the humility and the faith to repent. — Henry B. Eyring

you cannot be friends either with boy or man unless you give yourself away in the process, and Mr. Pembroke did not commend this. He, for "personal intercourse," substituted the safer "personal influence," and gave his junior hints on the setting of kindly traps, in which the boy does give himself away and reveals his shy delicate thoughts, while the master, intact, commends or corrects them.
Originally Rickie had meant to help boys in the anxieties that they undergo when changing into men: at Cambridge he had numbered this among life's duties. But here is a subject in which we must
inevitably speak as one human being to another, not as one who has authority or the shadow of authority, and for this reason the elder school-master could suggest nothing but a few formulae. Formulae, like kindly traps, were not in Rickie's line, so he abandoned these
subjects altogether and confined himself to working hard at what was easy. — E. M. Forster

To speak his thoughts is every freeman's right, in peace and war, in council and in fight. — Homer

We speak about losing our minds as if it is a bad thing. I say, lose your mind. Do it purposefully. Find out who you really are beyond your thoughts and beliefs. Lose your mind, find your soul. — Vironika Tugaleva

If a man like that is killed, there is always another to take his place. That is not the important thing. But to act so that no man dares to strike you because he knows you speak the truth, to act so that you can no longer be arrested because you are asking for the right to live, to act so that all of this will end, both here and elsewhere; that is what should be in your thoughts. That is what you must explain to others, so that you will never again be forced to bow down before anyone, but also so that no one shall be forced to bow down before you. It was to tell you this that I asked you to come, because hatred must not dwell with you. — Ousmane Sembene

Think about rethinking what you're thinking, before speaking the thought you were thinking, and cause unintended consequences for speaking what you probably shouldn't have been thinking. — T.F. Hodge

Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval. — Susan B. Anthony

Within seconds thoughts become words that slip off our tongue and into the world. Pausing before we speak may seem cumbersome, but it allows us to decide: Is this helpful? Does this need to be said now? What is the best way to say this? — David Jeremiah

Tartuffe: For heaven's sake! Before you speak, I pray you take this handkerchief.
Dorine: Whatever do you mean?
Tartuffe: Cove your bosom. I can't bear to see it. Such pernicious sights give rise to sinful thoughts.
Dorine: You're mighty susceptible to temptation then! The flesh must make a great impression on you! I really don't know why you should get so excited. I can't say that I'm so easily roused. I could see you naked from head to foot and your whole carcass wouldn't tempt me in the least. — Moliere

I hope that wherever else I have failed, whatever harm I have caused to strangers and friends, that you may speak for me. Not before a pulpit or upon a stage. Not with words great or loud. But only to be, to persist, to live a life with pride and worth. In twenty years' time, thirty, or forty I hope that you may sit upon the porch of your home, look out upon a greening field that you have tilled, see your children surrounding you with love, and think for a moment upon me. That is all now that I truly wish for. To be for a moment in your thoughts, when I have long passed from this earth, and perhaps in a way I may find my redemption, an earthly redemption, not everlasting, but scared nonetheless. — Tara Conklin

Phaedra shook her head. If your people mean no offense, they should not speak their thoughts out loud in front of their children, Tesadora. Because it will be their children who come to slaughter us one day, all because of careless words passed down by their elders who meant no harm. — Melina Marchetta

I was a Marxist Utopian dreamer for a decade before I learned the vulnerabilities of Marxist theories. As I looked back it was full of deeply flawed arguments, but they were central to my thoughts in the fifties. I let their words saturate my mind before I went to seminary, and they remained in my mind like a ghost well beyond my years at Yale.The ideas I most loved were expressed by three in particular: the will to power (Nietzsche), the desire to understand the sexual roots of all behavior (Freud) and the search for radical social change (Marx). Even today when I speak of modernity, I am pointing especially to those three prototypes of modern consciousness. — Thomas C. Oden

The encrusted religious structure is not changed by its institutional dependents--they are part of the crust. It is changed by one who goes alone to the wilderness, where he fasts and prays, and returns with cleansed vision. In going alone, he goes independent of institutions, forswearing orthodoxy ("right opinion"). In going to the wilderness he goes to the margin, where he is surrounded by the possibilities--by no means all good--that orthodoxy has excluded. By fasting he disengages his thoughts from the immediate issues of livelihood; his willing hunger takes his mind off the payroll, so to speak. And by praying he acknowledges ignorance; the orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out. He returns to the community, not necessarily with new truth, but with a new vision of the truth; he sees it more whole than before. — Wendell Berry

Isaiah 55:6-13 God's ways and thoughts are infinitely higher than those of the most brilliant human. Yet His words in Scripture communicate well enough to bring about supernatural change in those who hear its truth. The purpose of communication is not to speak, but to be heard and understood. — Sid Buzzell

Thinking cannot be clear until it has had expression-we must write, or speak, or act our thoughts, or they will remain in half torpid form. Our feelings must have expression, or they will be as clouds, which, till they descend in rain, will never bring up fruit or flowers. So it is with all the inward feelings; expression gives them development-thought is the blossom; language is the opening bud; action the fruit behind it. — Henry Ward Beecher

My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid - not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered. — Trevor Noah

You will experience a lot of imaginings as usually is for humans although we tend to pretend that all our thoughts are septic and moral. Feel
comfortable with your thoughts. Trust me dear child, no human is spared from wild thoughts and you too will have them. Nothing should limit you my child. But the minute you decide to speak out your thinking or live them, you should be ready for the consequences too. — Gloria D. Gonsalves

But if you could read my thoughts, you would be welcome to come in
and listen to the story of my life. At least, you could slip your arm through
the bars and touch me and I will hold out my forepaw to greet you, after
retracting my claws, of course. You are carried away by appearances - my
claws and fangs and the glowing eyes frighten you no doubt. I don't blame
you. I don't know why God has chosen to give us this fierce make-up, the
same God who has created the parrot, the peacock, and the deer, which
inspire poets and painters. I would not blame you for keeping your distance
- I myself shuddered at my own reflection on the still surface of a pond
while crouching for a drink of water, not when I was really a wild beast, but
after I came under the influence of my Master and learnt to question, 'Who
am I?' Don't laugh within yourself to hear me speak thus. I'll tell you about
my Master presently. — R.K. Narayan

You spoke to strangers for hours. Afterward you walked the streets in search of other cafes, but they were closed. You stretched out on the park benches of a square near the Gare Saint-Lazare, and you remarked on the shape of the clouds. At six o'clock you had breakfast. At seven you took the first train home. When, the next day, your friends repeated to you the words you had spoken to strangers in the cafe, you remembered nothing of them. It was as though someone else inside you had spoken. You recognized neither your words, nor your thoughts, but you liked them better than you would have if you had remembered saying them. Often all it took was for someone else to speak your own words back to you for you to like them. — Edouard Leve

I can hear. Hear them. It. Don't you hear? It was a struggle to speak, to form coherent thoughts. The call here was different; not the beehive sound of Craigh na Dun, but a hum like the vibration of the air following the striking of a great bell. I could feel it ringing in the long bones of my arms, echoing through pectoral girdle and spine. Jamie — Diana Gabaldon

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, "This ... this ... "; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos. — Paul Goodman

The thoughts we think and the words we speak creates our
experiences. — Louise Hay

Those in whom the faculty of reason is predominant, and who most skillfully dispose their thoughts with a view to render them clear and intelligible, are always the best able to persuade others of the truth of what they lay down, though they should speak only in the language of Lower Brittany, and be wholly ignorant of the rules of rhetoric; and those whose minds are stored with the most agreeable fancies, and who can give expression to them with the greatest embellishment and harmony, are still the best poets, though unacquainted with the art of poetry. — Rene Descartes

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children. And he said: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. — Kahlil Gibran

Words ruin one's thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one's memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something. Paper can turn an enormity into a triviality, an absurdity. If you look at it this way, then whatever appears in the world, by way of the spiritual world so to speak, is always a ruined thing, a ridiculous thing, which means that everything in this world is ridiculous and ruined. Words were made to demean thought, I would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought, and one day they will succeed one hundred percent in so doing. In any case, words (are) bringing everything down. Depression derives from words, nothing else. — Thomas Bernhard

Charlotte met eyes with the sofa. That is, if the sofa had eyes, she would have met eyes with it. As it was, she just had the creepy sensation that it *knew* she was looking at it. Which of course it didn't. It was just a sofa after all. A sofa that seemed to have eyes, and if it did have eyes, it would be glaring - kind of smugly. A smug kind of glare
She was still rambling, even in her thoughts.
Shut up, Charlotte, she told herself.
She pointed at the sofa. "It was there."
Eddie didn't speak. Perhaps if he had, he would have rambled too. Instead, he approached the sofa cautiously (almost as if the sofa had eyes and Eddie didn't like the way it was smugly glaring) and lifted the velvet coverlet. — Shannon Hale

Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren't interested in), people don't speak their beliefs easily, or publicly. — Edward R. Murrow

But angels come to lead frail minds to rest in chaste desires, on heavenly beauty bound. You frame my thoughts, and fashion me within; you stop my tongue, and teach my heart to speak. — Edmund Spenser

Another explained, I think I'd speak for any introvert when I say if you could hear all the thoughts running through an introvert's mind at any given moment - you'd feel like you'd just had your ear talked off for the last hour. — Sophia Dembling

The cross that my Lord calls me to carry may assume many different shapes. I may have to be content with mundane tasks in a limited area of service, when I may balieve my abilities are suited for much greater work. I may be required to continually cultivate the same field year after year, even though it yields no harvest whatsoever. I may be asked of God to nurture kind and loving thoughts about the very person who has wronged me and to speak gently to him, take his side when others oppose him, and bestow sympathy and comfort to him. I may have to openly testify of my Master before those who do not want to be reminded of Him or His claims. And I may be called to walk through this world with a bright, smiling face while my heart is breaking... "I grow under the load." -Alexander Smellie — Lettie B. Cowman

P.C. Hodgell said - That which can be destroyed by the truth should be. Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say - If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

The old don was finding it hard to live in Christian hope and the general trajectory of his thoughts was retrospective rather than anticipatory. He had recently met his first wife in a pub for a drink and he had expected, foolishly and romantically, that they might speak about the love that they had once shared and what might have been had they stayed together, but instead they had talked about growing deaf, their arthritis, and how much time they had left on earth. 'Old — James Runcie

Intellectuals seemed to think that their life - the life of the mind, the endless self examination, the continuous autobiography afflicted upon all comers-was somehow higher than the repetitive, meaningless lives of the common people. Virlomi knew the opposite to be true. The intellectuals in the university were all the same. They had precisely the same deep thoughts about exactly the same shallow emotions and trivial dilemmas. They knew this, unconsciously, themselves. When a real event happened, something that shook them to the heart, they withdraw from the game of university life, for reality had to be played out on a different stage.
In the villages, life was about life, not about one-upmanship and display. Smart people were valued because they could solve problems, not because they could speak pleasantly about them. — Orson Scott Card

Beauty has so many charms, one knows not how to speak against it; and when it happens that a graceful figure is the habitation of a virtuous soul, when the beauty of the face speaks out the modesty and humility of the mind, and the justness of the proportion raises our thoughts up to the heart and wisdom of the great Creator, something may be allowed it,
and something to the embellishments which set it off; and yet, when the whole apology is read, it will be found at last that beauty, like truth, never is so glorious as when it goes the plainest. — Laurence Sterne

The greatest blunder I have seen that almost everyone makes is to just speak their mind. It doesn't make any sense. They sound like the squawking ducks in a pond. The mind is not meant to be spoken. The mind is mostly waves of thoughts and sensations from many sources. The mind is meant to know the truth. Know your own mind and use it to speak the truth. — Harbhajan Singh Yogi

Don't want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak. — Nikki Giovanni

So, when there is a strife of tongues, at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain unity, suggests that every one shall speak in French. Perhaps it is bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker's thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uniformity. — Virginia Woolf

I have no use for it. My will needs no amplifying. My will shapes worlds. The amulet was fashioned for one like you with no will of which to speak." "Just because we can't manipulate reality with our thoughts doesn't mean we don't have will. Maybe we do shape reality, just on a different scale, and you don't see it. — Karen Marie Moning

Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable. — Virginia Woolf

Kerrigan?" she tried again.
"Aye, Lady Mouse. I am here."
Relieved, she smiled at the sound of his voice in her head. During the day, he was oft silent. But at night ... at night he would speak softly to her and tell her of his travels through time as he eluded those who were after him.
"Where are you today, my lord?"
"I'm in Venice, during a carnival. It's beautiful here. There are minstrels and acrobats all around. Plenty of places to hide from Morgen and her spies."
"You are safe?"
"Aye, Lady Mouse. I am always safe. But I've no wish to talk about me. How are you doing?"
"I miss you."
She swore she could feel his pain as well as her own.
"I miss you as well and I think of you constantly."
-Kerrigan and Seren communicating though their thoughts as they were apart. — Kinley MacGregor

Today we are mentally preparing for tomorrow. The thoughts we think, the words we speak, the beliefs we accept, shape our tomorrows. — Louise Hay

In a sense, one could speak of the secret life of colour. Despite its outward beckoning, like true beauty, colour is immensely hesitant in giving away its secrets. Painters learn to respect the hesitancy of colour and endeavour to refine their skill to become worthy of its revelations. A painter learns the language of colour slowly. As with any language, you struggle for a long time outside the language. There is a willed deliberateness to how you sequence the strange words to make a sentence.Then one day the language lets you in to where the words dance to your thoughts with ease and fluency. Perhaps for the painter there is a day when colour lets him in, when his palette sings with synergy and delight. — John O'Donohue

Any one may mouth out a passage with theatrical cadence or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts. But to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. — William Hazlitt

He had stayed. And fought for me.
Week after week, he'd fought for me, even when I had no reaction , even when I had barely been able to speak or bring myself to care if I lived or died or ate or starved. I couldn't leave him to his own dark thoughts, his own guilt. He'd shouldered them alone long enough. — Sarah J. Maas

Literature is the voice of the age and the state; the character, energy, and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds; they are organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires. — Edward Everett

A slave is he who cannot speak his thoughts. — Euripides