Quote of the Day (W. Somerset Maugham, on the Necessity of Speaking)

“If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.” —English man of letters W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), The Painted Veil (1925)

Quote of the Day (Gustave Flaubert, on Human Speech)

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”—French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), Madame Bovary (1857)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Carlyle, on Silence and Speech)

"Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time."—Scottish historian-essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), “On Sir Walter Scott” (1838)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Mann, on Why Speech is ‘Civilization Itself’)

“Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates.”— German novelist and Nobel Literature laureate Thomas Mann (1875-1955), The Magic Mountain (1924)