Communication Quotes

Quotations about communication. People are social beings, and we need communication to live in relationship with each other. The challenge of communication is that we are also diverse individuals with different experiences, so what we are trying to communicate may not be exactly what the other person receives.

To have much learning, to be skillful in handicraft, well-trained in discipline, and to be of good speech — this is the greatest blessing.

In describing today’s accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.

There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe…
At every crossing of the threads there is an individual.
And every individual is a crystal bead.
And every crystal bead reflects
Not only the light from every other crystal in the net
But also every other reflection
Throughout the entire universe.

If you can’t protect yourself with talk, you won’t be alive to protect yourself with guns.

To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients — care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.

Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.

How can we speak to each other like equals when one of us is holding a gun?

The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.

There are many controversial topics out there – abortion, nuclear weapons, the 2nd Amendment, guns, whatever, the war in Iraq. You’re going to be on one side, somebody’s going to be on the other side. Invite those people to the table. Sit down and talk.

The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choices words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.

While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.

It’s very dramatic when two people come together to work something out. It’s easy to take a gun and annihilate your opposition, but what is really exciting to me is to see people with differing views come together and finally respect each other.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else … Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

Knowledge can be communicated by not wisdom.

Happiness comes when your work and words are of benefit to yourself and others.

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.

The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.

To listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well.

Parents, choose your words wisely, carefully, thoughtfully. In the same way that violence begets violence and anger begets anger, kindness begets kindness and peace begets peace. Sow words of peace, words that build, words that show respect and belief and support.

People change and forget to tell each other.

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.

[A]ll change, even very large and powerful change, begins when a few people start talking with one another about something they care about.

If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

There is no guarantee that starting a small conversation will lead to something larger. But the failure to take any step at all, no matter how small, comes with an ironclad guarantee that we will not be part of helping change happen.

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side.