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William Shakespeare

Socrates

Richard Harding Davis

Black Elk

Pearl S. Buck

Samuel Beckett

John Cheever

Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say that the greatest good of a man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living — that you are still less likely to believe.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

For aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.

William Shakespeare

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.

Age becomes reality when you hear someone refer to 'that attractive young woman standing next to the woman in the green dress,' and you find that you're the one in the green dress.

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

My heart is a stone: heavy with sadness for my people; cold with the knowledge that no treaty will keep whites out of our lands; hard with the determination to resist as long as I live and breathe. Now we are weak and many of our people are afraid. But hear me: a single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong. Someday I will embrace our brother tribes and draw them into a bundle and together we will win our country back from the whites.

All through the night, like the tumult of a river when it races between the cliffs of a canyon, in my sleep I could hear the steady roar of the passing army.

Richard Harding Davis

A man with a mouth like a mastiff, a brow like a mountain and eyes like burning anthracite — that was Dan'l Webster in his prime. And the biggest case he argued never got written down in the books, for he argued it against the devil, nip and tuck and no holds barred. And this is the way I used to hear it told.

Stephen Vincent Benét

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

Laurence J. Peter

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!

Jazz will endure, just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

John Philip Sousa

Him, who incessantly laughs in the street, you may commonly hear grumbling in his closet.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. [It] has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Robert Penn Warren

The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.

Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!

Lydia Maria Child

The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

Much advance publicity was made for the address the Master would deliver on The Destruction of the World and a large crowd gathered at the monastery grounds to hear him.
The address was over in less than a minute. All he said was:
"These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness."

Anthony de Mello

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

God Almighty is, to be sure, unmoved by passion or appetite, unchanged by affection; but then it is to be added that He neither sees nor hears nor perceives things by any senses like ours; but in a manner infinitely more perfect.

I cannot always sympathize with that demand which we hear so frequently for cheap things. Things may be too cheap. They are too cheap when the man or woman who produces them upon the farm or the man or woman who produces them in the factory does not get out of them living wages with a margin for old age and for a dowry for the incidents that are to follow. I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth or shapes it into a garment will starve in the process.

Benjamin Harrison

When I hear somebody sigh that "Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"

Sydney J. Harris