Conversation / What to Say and How to Say it

Without the personal interest in the affairs of others which makes gossip possible, there would be no fellowship or warmth in life; social intercourse and conversation would be inhuman and lifeless.

Conversation at its highest is the most delightful of intellectual stimulants; at its lowest the most deadening to intellect.

"Whosoever seeketh must know that which he seeketh for in a general notion, else how shall he know it when he hath found it?"

It was not the word, but adroitness in using it,

You can tell the lowest class by their habit of talking about nothing else but persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to talk about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.

One should have a command of words, to be sure; one should know more descriptive words than "awful, fierce, fine, charming"--terms used in an unthinking way by people who do not concern themselves with specific adjectives.

The uneducated are frightened at the mere thought of criticism; the cultivated are not.

the more intellectual people are, the more the homely things of life interest them.

but how colorless are the people who never have critical opinions on anything or anybody; or people who, having them, never express them!

'Coquetting with an echo,' Carlyle called it. For, tho it may make a man feel mentally masterful at first, it makes him feel mentally maudlin at last; and, as the Abbé says, to be bored one's self is a sure sign that one's companion is also weary."