We Talk Less Quotes & Sayings

It's a weird thing society puts on us women. They tell us we can have careers (well, after they told us we could vote-they sort of said it would be ok if we wanted to have a career, as long as we agree to get paid less than a man for the same job), and then they tell us that we aren't real women if we have careers but no babies, and if we dare pick a career over a baby...we better at least talk about that career like its a baby in order to blend in and not call attention to the fact that we're selfish women who are not carrying on the human race. — Jen Kirkman

We talk of literature as if it were a mere matter of rule and measurement, a series of processes long since brought to mechanical perfection: but it would be less incorrect to say that it all lies in the future; tried by the outdoor standard, there is as yet no literature, but only glimpses and guideboards; no writer has yet succeeded in sustaining, through more than some single occasional sentence, that fresh and perfect charm. If by the training of a lifetime one could succeed in producing one continuous page of perfect cadence, it would be a life well spent, and such a literary artist would fall short of Nature's standard in quantity only, not in quality. — Brenda Wineapple

When faced with choosing between attributing their pain to "being crazy" and having had abusive parents, clients will choose "crazy" most of the time. Dora, a 38-year-old, was profoundly abused by multiple family perpetrators and has grappled with cutting and eating disordered behaviors for most of her life. She poignantly echoed this dilemma in her therapy:
I hate it when we talk about my family as "dysfunctional" or "abusive." Think about what you are asking me to accept - that my parents didn't love me, care about me, or protect me. If I have to choose between "being abused" or "being sick and crazy," it's less painful to see myself as nuts than to imagine my parents as evil. — Lisa Ferentz

First thing we need to understand about shame resilience is that the less we talk about shame, the more we have it. — Brene Brown

We realy must work on our communitcation. Perhaps if you were not so constantly intrested in other forms of intimacy, I might actually have access to the information I need to survive with my temper intact!" Alexia poked at him with a sharp finger. "More talk, less bed sport. — Gail Carriger

No duties. I don't have to be profound.
I don't have to be artistically perfect.
Or sublime. Or edifying.
I just wander. I say: 'You were running,
That's fine. It was the thing to do.'
And now the music of the worlds transforms me.
My planet enters a different house.
Trees and lawns become more distinct.
Philosophies one after another go out.
Everything is lighter yet not less odd.
Sauces, wine vintages, dishes of meat.
We talk a little of district fairs,
Of travels in a covered wagon with a cloud of dust behind,
Of how rivers once were, what the scent of calamus is.
That's better than examining one's private dreams.
And meanwhile it has arrived. It's here, invisible.
Who can guess how it got here, everywhere.
Let others take care of it. Time for me to play hooky.
Buena notte. Ciao. Farewell. — Czeslaw Milosz

We acknowledge that we should not talk of our wives; but we seem not to know that we should talk still less of ourselves. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

What we talk about less often, because it is harder to explain, is the way a perfume can give breath and body to the phantom selves that waft about us as we go through our days -- not just the showgirl, the femme fatale, and the ingenue, but all the memories and dreams of the taller, meaner, sharper, sweeter, softer people we have been or long to be. — Alyssa Harad

Capital is never quiet: it is always risk-oriented and entrepreneurial, at least at its inception, yet it always tends to transform itself into rents as it accumulates in large enough amounts - that is its vocation, its logical destination. What, then, gives us the vague sense that social inequality today is very different from social inequality in the age of Balzac and Austen? Is this just empty talk with no purchase on reality, or can we identify objective factors to explain why some people think that modern capital has become more "dynamic" and less "rent-seeking? — Thomas Piketty

The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed. — George Orwell

I often look to men to model behavior," she goes on after a pause. "Not because I want to squelch what's feminine about me, but because sometimes I want a little more action, a little less feeling in my interactions. I've been doing this thing lately where I try to talk slower at meetings. I take a lot of meetings with women and we all talk really fast. But every guy talks so much slower. Maybe there's a scientist who could tell me why, but I think men are just a little bit more comfortable taking up conversational real estate. So I've been seeing how slow I can tolerate talking. I'm doing it now. Let me tell you, it's really hard for me. — Amy Poehler

I still think that we have a hesitance to talk about things racial. And I think we do it at our detriment. We go from incident to incident, and we have spikes in which race becomes something that we talk about, as opposed to talking about race in those less contentious times when I think we might make more progress. — Eric Holder

We can talk to one another on telephones
in banks, in cars, in line. No more
sitting on the floor
attached to a cord
while everybody listens.
No more
standing outside the booth
in the cold, fingering
an adulterous dime. We

send each other mail without stamps.
Watch television without antennas.
Wear seatbelts, smoke less, and never
on a bus, never
in the lobby while we're waiting
for the lawyer to call on us.

Nowhere now, a typewriter ribbon.
Quaintly the record album's scratch and spin.
Our groceries, scanned.
Pump our own gas.
Take off our shoes
before boarding our plane.
Those towers: Gone. And Pluto's
no longer a planet:
Forget it.
I could go on

and on, but you're still dead
and nothing's any different. — Laura Kasischke

You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all. — Cormac McCarthy

We talk about our friends behind their backs. We do. Ask any social scientist who has studies human communication behaviors. Even you edmitted to doing this. Our friends are witnese to our attributes and flaws, our bad habits and good qualities, our contradictions and our contrivances. That they need to occasionally discuss the negative aspects or our lives and personalities in terms less than admiring is to be expected. — Cheryl Strayed

Especially when you are advertising a product, I talk to the photographer and we create a character - it always gives you more freedom because it makes it less about yourself. — Penelope Cruz

Anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone. — Fred Rogers

He stabs his fingers through his drying hair and resumes his pacing. "You think I don't know this went really fast? I didn't plan for this to happen. Hell, I didn't even know if you'd let me talk to you, much less be with you. But then you did and we did and ... " He stops in the center of the room and stares at me, his shoulders sagging. "I figured out pretty quick that this is a forever thing for me. I think it has been from the very beginning. — Kate Avelynn

I couldn't trust you with it. To do something with it. I don't want anybody talking about me. To say where I was or what I said when I was there. I mean, you could talk about me maybe. But nobody could say that it was me. I could be anybody. I think in times like these the less said the better. If something had happened and we were survivors and we met on the road then we'd have something to talk about. But we're not. So we don't. — Cormac McCarthy

What was wrong with the past?" asked Mama Ramotswe. She intended the question seriously. There were too many people who took the view that the past was bad, that we should rid ourselves of all traces of it as soon as possible. But the past was not bad; some of it may have been less than perfect-- there had been cruelties then that we had done well to get rid of-- but there had also been plenty of good things. There had been the old Botswana ways, the courtesy and the kindness; there had been the attitude that you should find time for other people and not always be in a desperate rush; there had been the belief that you should listen to other people, should talk to them, rather than spend all your time fiddling with your electronic gadgets; there had been the view that it was a good thing to sit under a tree sometimes and look up at the sky and think about cattle or pumpkins or non-electric things like that. — Alexander McCall Smith

You seldom see it in the papers. Once in a while some guys get put up for decorations and a ceremony takes place somewhere. You see them in dress uniforms, standing proud. But that's politics and theater. You should see them as I have, downrange, in action. They're amazing to watch, risking their lives to serve their country. I don't like to talk about valor awards. I don't think it's useful to think about them. We just go to work, and it's the work itself that tells us who we are. Our pride is no less without the fanfare. — Marcus Luttrell

I hope that, by this point, you're feeling a little less intimidated by the meanies, because I've got some bad news: Meanies come in many forms, not just human. They can be not only animal, but also mineral. In rare cases, they can even be vegetable, but we can talk about William F. Buckley some other time. — June Casagrande

We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your Bible and the works of your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one fact. We know all about your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles. We want a this year's fact. We ask only one. Give us one fact for charity. Your miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two thousand years. — Robert G. Ingersoll

The changes we make in life often happen when we have a degree of certainty. However, the pain of our past failures and the fears of our peers often fuel our uncertainty. This inability to predict the future is why people find themselves stuck and unable to move forward. They don't want to feel the emotions of failure. They prefer to talk themselves into settling for an "okay" life, rather than the life they really want. However, failure is a matter of perspective! Is it not failure when you don't take a chance on the one thing you need? There is no happiness in regret, staying safe or settling for anything less than what you can have through action. — Shannon L. Alder

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff - this is gonna get very abstract - but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely. — David Foster Wallace

Understanding knowledge as an essential element of love is vital because we are bombarded daily with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known. We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message is received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction. — Bell Hooks

The winter wind is loud and wild, Come close to me, my darling child; Forsake thy books, and mate less play; And, while the night is gathering grey, We'll talk its pensive hours away. — Emily Bronte

The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may listen the more and talk the less. — Zeno Of Citium

The more we talk about the past, the less we heal from it. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

He meets me where I am, and because of the downward tilt of the driveway, we are toe to toe, nose to nose. "Willowdean Opal Dickson, you are beautiful. Fuck anyone who's ever made you feel anything less." His chest heaves. "When I close my eyes, I see you. I can talk to you. In a way I never have with anyone else. — Julie Murphy

The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn't floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.
Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture - exploit the new thing then move on.
There's a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.
Reading is where the wild things are. — Jeanette Winterson

There are moments in history that seem like a mist, as if what really happens matters less that what should have happened. The mists lift suddenly and there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn't have to be earned and it can't be lost. Just for a moment I see us that way; I see us all. Restored and repaired. Reunited. Refulgent. — Karen Joy Fowler

I cannot say for sure when my reliable ideas about God began to slip away, but the big chest I used to keep them in is smaller than a shoebox now. Most of the time, I feel so ashamed about this that I do not own up to it unless someone else mentions it first. Then we find a quiet place where we can talk about what it is like to feel more and more devoted to a relationship that we are less and less able to say anything about. — Barbara Brown Taylor

The more there is a European solution to a theoretical, but possible, problem in the markets, the less we will have to talk about an I.M.F. solution. — George Papandreou

But I talk about my life anyway because if, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but spiritually. — Frederick Buechner

I cannot talk of the power of want, of how much desire can do. I don't think it can be measured. I think want is forgotten too quickly or dismissed as being worth far less than the other feelings -love, hate, envy. But to want something ... To wish for it so much that you think you cannot last, your heart and body cannot continue to hunger for something as much as this. It comes from loss. We want what we do not have. We want what we had, but don't now. — Susan Fletcher

If we would talk less and pray more about them, things would be better than they are in the world: at least, we should be better enabled to bear them. — John Owen

There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things - her or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation - I think of it as 'whole person conversation' - if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don't look away or text a friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about 'conversations' being boring, such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness. — Sherry Turkle

We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. — George F. Kennan

When we talk about gender pay gaps in the United States, and if you look at women without children, they earn 96 cents for every dollar that a man is earning, while for mothers it is about 76 cents. That's nearly 25 percent less. For single mothers, the situation is even worse. One third of them are living in poverty or just on the edge of poverty. This is an unacceptable situation. — Anne-Marie Slaughter

Or your arms," Trenton added. "Because if you ever talk to her with anything less than a respectful tone again, I will rip those fuckers off and beat you with 'em. Do we understand each other? — Jamie McGuire

But therein lies the paradox: Speaking out and being "real" are not necessarily virtues. Sometimes voicing our thoughts and feelings shuts down the lines of communication, diminishes or shames another person, or makes it less likely that two people can hear each other or even stay in the same room. Nor is talking always a solution. We know from personal experience that our best intentions to process a difficult issue can move a situation from bad to worse. We can also talk a particular subject to death, or focus on the negative in a way that draws us deeper into it, when we'd be better off distracting ourselves and going bowling. — Harriet Lerner

And if we all have shame, the good news is that we're all capable of developing shame resilience. Shame resilience is the ability to recognize shame, to move through it constructively while maintaining worthiness and authenticity, and to ultimately develop more courage, compassion, and connection as a result of our experience. The first thing we need to understand about shame resilience is that the less we talk about shame, the more we have it. Shame — Brene Brown

We really haven't talked anything over - " she said. "What is there to talk about?" I said. "Nothing you could say would make me love you more or less. Our love is too deep for words ever to touch it. It's soul love." She sighed. "How lovely that is - if it's true." She put her hands close together, but not touching. "Our souls in love." "A love that can weather anything," I said. — Kurt Vonnegut

If we are forced to talk about our lives, our sexuality, and our work only in the language and categories of a society that despises us, eventually we will be unable to speak past our own griefs. We will disappear into those categories. What I have tried to do in my own life is refuse the language and categories that would reduce me to less than my whole complicated experience. — Dorothy Allison

I tell Dylan I have to go to the bathroom. I shut the door and try to pee, but my dick's already sticking straight up at the ceiling. Great. I'm sure she caught that minor detail. We haven't even kissed yet. I shake my head and do my best to pee. I pull my pants back up, trying to make my hard-on less obvious. I stare at myself in the mirror and splash cold water on my face to calm down. My face flushed.
I concentrate on one critical thing. Last, Gray. You've got to make it last. No two pumps, you're done. Don't be that guy. You're stronger than that.
Think sports.
Try to name every candy bar you can.
Think about anything but what her body feel like, because as soon as you let yourself go there, It's over.
Enough with the pep talk. I take a deep breath. This is it. It's what you were born to do. — Katie Kacvinsky

What phones do to in-person conversation is a problem. Studies show that the mere presence of a phone on the table (even a phone turned off) changes what people talk about. If we think we might be interrupted, we keep conversations light, on topics of little controversy or consequence. And conversations with phones on the landscape block empathic connection. If two people are speaking and there is a phone on a nearby desk, each feels less connected to the other than when there is no phone present. Even a silent phone disconnects us. — Sherry Turkle

We wake up one day surprised to find ourselves in a less desirable situation that we don't remember consenting to, but we stay in it because for some reason we feel obligated. As time passes, we convince, fool, and talk ourselves into believing things are normal. It's not until we see the dream we lost that we realize what a nightmare we're in. — Alison G. Bailey

I could care less if people talk about us or not. We know what we can do here. It's an exciting time for us. — Chase Utley

From earlier orgasms. He was slow and steady with his pace, less rough than he often tended to be, his usual sex talk absent. But, because of the things we'd shared, his measured thrusts felt raw, more intent on — Laurelin Paige

If every mother in the United States could wrap her mind around her true value as a woman and mother, her life would never be the same. We would wake up every morning excited for the day rather feeling as though we'd been hit by a truck during the night. We would talk differently to our kids, fret less about our husbands' annoying habits, and speak with greater tenderness and clarity. We would find more contentment in our relationships, let means remarks roll off our backs, and leave work feeling confident in the job we performed. And best of all - we wouldn't obsess about our weight (can you imagine?), physical fitness, or what kind of home we live in. We would live a kinda of home we live in. We would live free from superficial needs because we would know deep in our hearts what we need and more importantly, what we don't need. Each of us would live a life of extraordinary freedom. — Meg Meeker

Not take prisoners," Prince Andrew continued: "That by itself would quite change the whole war and make it less cruel. As it is we have played at war - that's what's vile! We play at magnanimity and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kindhearted that she can't look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce. They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It's all rubbish! I saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they humbugged us and we humbugged them. They plunder other people's — Leo Tolstoy

We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and for each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make. The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependant on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse, and we know that it will not do. — Wendell Berry

We should talk less and draw more. (Goethe) — Aldous Huxley

If your coping mechanism to date has been to ignore your weight, don't feel badly. You're in good company. I've done my share of standing on the doctor's scale backwards, cringing as the nurse scribbled on the clipboard, anxious when the doctor came in glancing over my record. I scrutinized his face for any semblance of judgment. Whether or not I faced the scale or the doctor skipped a pep talk, it didn't change the truth and it still pervaded every hour of my waking thoughts. I knew what I needed to do and just agonizingly prolonged it. What about you?

We want our lies to be true--desperately. We think it means less work, less pain. But aren't we experiencing work and pain every day when we are obese? We don't escape it, we just reallocate it, attach it to different problems.

The sooner we face the numbers and start to deal with them, the sooner we can resolve them. — Shannon Sorrels

One of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you're likely to be. In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations. We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being good dialecticians. Marx wants to recover the intuitive power of the dialectical method and put it to work in understanding how everything is in process, everything is in motion. He doesn't simply talk about labor; he talks about the labor process. Capital is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion. When circulation stops, value disappears and the whole system comes tumbling down. — David Harvey

If we accept being talked to any kind of a way, then we are telling ourselves we are not quite worth the best. And if we have the effrontery to talk to anybody with less than courtesy, we tell ourselves and the world we are not very intelligent. — Maya Angelou

If we would talk more about the Lord and praise Him, we would have less time to talk about ourselves. — M. R. DeHaan

So if this were a normal book about a girl with leukemia, I would probably talk a shitload about all the meaningful things Rachel had to say as she got sicker and sicker, and also probably we would fall in love and have some incredibly fulfilling romantic thing and she would die in my arms. But I don't feel like lying to you. She didn't have meaningful things to say, and we definitely didn't fall in love. She seemed less pissed with me after my stupid outburst, but she basically just went from irritable to quiet. — Jesse Andrews

We'll make love often in the first year, less in the second, and after the third year, people perhaps think about sex only once every two weeks and transform that thought into action only once a month. Even worse, we'll barely talk. — Paulo Coelho

The only way to maximize group creativity - to make the whole more than the sum of its parts - is to encourage a candid discussion of mistakes. In part, this is because the acceptance of error reduces cost. When you believe your flaws will be quickly corrected by the group, you're less worried about perfecting your contribution, which leads to a more candid conversation. We can only get it right when we talk about what we got wrong. — Jonah Lehrer

[T]he categories of intentionality are nothing more nor less than the metalinguistic categories in terms of which we talk epistemically about overt speech as they appear in the framework of thoughts construed on the model of over speech. — Wilfrid Sellars

It's unfashionable these days to talk about sin, and it's even less fashionable to talk about idolatry. The world likes to tell us that we're beyond that now. When we honestly discuss the sinful attitudes behind our actions, we are often shushed: "You're not that bad! Everyone does those things! You need to have better self esteem!" But the human heart is the same now as it was in biblical times. We don't have to bow down to a golden statue to worship idols. When we trust in anything other than God for peace and happiness we are essentially practicing idolatry. Only when we see the idols yet in our hearts can we truly "put off the old self" and "put on the new self" (Colossians 3:5-10). — Staci Eastin

One of the main problems in families today is that we spend less and less time together ... Time together is precious time-time needed to talk, to listen, to encourage, and to show how to do things. — James E. Faust

We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less. — Diogenes

Why, if economic freedom has proven itself time and time again to be the engine of prosperity, do we keep moving toward Big Government? Why is a pro-freedom agenda so hard to come by and to defend? Why, no matter the rhetoric, no matter the mood of the electorate, no matter how much the weight of Big Government pulls down economic progress, do we get more regulations, more government spending, less economic freedom? The answer might surprise you. It has to do with something we don't often talk about in explicit terms. It has to do with morality. — Yaron Brook

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable. — Eric Hoffer

If you're the dad of a daughter, your job is particularly important, affecting her self-esteem, her autonomy, and her aspirations (according to one study, out of the University of British Columbia, daughters who see their dads doing chores are less likely to limit their
career aspirations to stereotypically female industries, like teaching or nursing). But you can't just talk the talk, you have to actually walk it. We promise, it'll pay off for you, too! Working dads who spend more time with their kids are happier in their jobs. They're also more patient, empathetic, and flexible - and at least one study claims it might just help them live longer. — Jessica Bennett

Krebs, who knew some Russian and at one stage in his career had been embraced by Stalin, was "a smooth, surviving type." And so, with almost incredible effrontery, he tried to talk to Chuikov as an equal, opening the conversation with the general comment:
"Today is the first of May, a great holiday for our two nations ... "
With seven million Russian dead, half his country devastated, and fresh evidence mounting daily of the unspeakable barbarity with which the Germans had treated Soviet captives and civilians, Chuikov's answer was a model of restraint, a standing testimony to the cool head and dry wit of that remarkable man. He said:
"We have a great holiday today. How things are with you over there it is less easy to say. — Alan Clark

Today, we have more information than ever, but less wisdom; more talk, but less listening; more things in the superficial showroom (celebrities are a good example), and less in the intellectual storeroom (that would be knowledge). — Cal Thomas

Indeed, we all know that the man who attentively contemplates a thing, who wants to see it as it is without changing anything, is 'absorbed,' so to speak, by this contemplation
i.e., by this thing. He forgets himself, he thinks only about the thing being contemplates; he thinks neither about his contemplation, nor
and even less
about himself, his "I," his Selbst. The more he is conscious of the thing, the less he is conscious of himself. He may perhaps talk about the thing, but he will never talk about himself; in his discourse, the word 'I' will not occur.
For this word to appear, something other than purely passive contemplation, which only reveals Being, must also be present. And this other thing, according to Hegel, is Desire, Begierde ... — Alexandre Kojeve

We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally
should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature,
communicate everything I have to say in sketches. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Seldom do we talk of ourselves with success. If I condemn myself, more is believed than is expressed; if I praise myself, much less. — Henry Home, Lord Kames

Everything starts from prayer. Without asking God for love, we cannot possess love and still less are we able to give it to others. Just as people today are speaking so much about the poor but they do not know or talk to the poor, we too cannot talk so much about prayer and yet not know how to pray. — Mother Teresa

I thought it was important to speak about what I believe would be the right response to Russian aggression in Ukraine. I'm pleased to hear there is more sanctions maybe coming tomorrow. But the truth of the matter is I think we need less talk and more deeds. — Mike Pence

Why is it so much easier to talk to a stranger? why do we feel we need to disconnect in order to connect? If I wrote "Dear Sofia" or "Dear Boomer" or "Dear Lily's Great-Aunt" at the top of this postcard, wouldn't that change the words that followed? Of course it would. But the question is: When I wrote "Dear Lily," was that just a version of "Dear Myself"? I know it was more than that. But it was also less than that, too — David Levithan

Because they don't teach the truth about the world, schools have to rely on beating students over the head with propaganda about democracy. If schools were, in reality, democratic, there would be no need to bombard students with platitudes about democracy. They would simply act and behave democratically, and we know this does not happen. The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is. — Noam Chomsky

Oh yes," she said, quickly. "I know all that. But don't talk of it - seven or six years - where may we all be by that time?" "They will soon glide by, and it will seem an astonishingly short time to look back upon when they are past - much less than to look forward to now. — Thomas Hardy

The weekly cartoons, as were my plays, came from a sense of criticism, criticism of the times, critical of the culture, of our manners and attitudes towards each other. The children's books come from the reverse. They're more supportive, since we're living in a time where we talk more about kids and do less, we talk about balancing the budget and we do it by cutting education. — Jules Feiffer

It seems almost oxymoronic to believe that this new idealism has led to a new pessimism about marriage, but that is exactly what has happened. In generations past there was far less talk about "compatibility" and finding the ideal soul mate. Today we are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires, and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for. — Timothy Keller

Our world does not need to hear more people talk about God or even about Jesus if those people do not have a lifestyle that reinforces every word they utter. The interesting thing is that the closer we walk in intimacy with God, the less we have to say. Our very lives become a bold and beautiful testimony to the purity, the freedom, and the beauty of the Lord Jesus. — Dennis F. Kinlaw

We talk too much. We should talk less and draw more. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

When we fear what other people think about us, we are frequently more focused on 'being interesting' and less focused on 'taking an interest.' That's why many people talk a great deal when they are anxious and why many people never feel heard. If both people and conversation are trying to be interesting, there is no one left to genuinely listen. — John Yokoyama

Nonetheless, I felt like I knew him well enough so that we did not have to do much talking. From the very beginning I had felt a definite contact with Yeoman, a kind of tenuous understanding that talk is pretty cheap in this league and that a man who knew what he was after had damn little time to find it, much less to sit back and explain himself. — Hunter S. Thompson