Grocott & Ward, comps. Grocott’s Familiar Quotations, 6th ed. 189-?.
Speech
Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.
Colossians, Chap. iv. Ver. 6.
A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.
Shakespeare.—Hamlet, Act IV. Scene 2. (Hamlet to Rosencrantz.)
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much—your hand thus; but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.
Shakespeare.—Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2. (The Prince and certain Players.)
O, it offends me to the soul, to see a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise: I could have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it outherods Herod; pray you, avoid it.
Shakespeare.—Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2. (The Prince to the Players.)
Where Nature’s end of language is declined,
And men talk only to conceal the mind.
Dr. Young.—Sat. II. Line 207. (To Chesterfield.)
The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.
Goldsmith.—The Bee, No. 3.
They only employ words for the purpose of concealing their thoughts.
Voltaire.—Le Chapon et la Poulard.
Speech is the index of the mind.
Seneca.—Epi. 1, near the end.
Speech is silvern, Silence is golden.
German Proverb.—T. Carlyle phrases it—Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden.—Sartor Resartus. Ch. III. Bk. 3.