Art Of Conversation Quotes

The art of conversation lies in listening ~ Malcolm Forbes

I happen to disagree with the well-entrenched theory that the art of conversation is merely the art of being a good listener. Such advice invites people to be cynical with one another and full of fake; when a conversation becomes a monologue, poked along with tiny cattle-prod questions, it isn't a conversation any more. ~ Barbara Walters

The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard. ~ William Hazlitt

The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life,
the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire
the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating
differences, arguing without offending. What have been called the
"cultural contradictions of capitalism" - its tendency to undermine
the stabilizing social forms it depends on - are on vivid display today
at the modern American dinner table, along with all the brightly colored packages that the food industry has managed to plant there. ~ Michael Pollan

Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. Okoye ~ Chinua Achebe

Look at all those unattractive people talking about depraved things all day long on TV talk shows. People can talk about themselves, yet the art of conversation, which has to do with sharing, is disappearing. I feel as though I am chasing a runaway locomotive. ~ Letitia Baldrige

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact. ~ David Halberstam

I enter into conference, and dispute with great liberty and facility, forasmuch as opinion meets in me with a soil very unfit for penetration, and wherein to take any deep root; no propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, though never so contrary to my own; there is no so frivolous and extravagant fancy that does not seem to me suitable to the production of human wit. We, who deprive our judgment of the right of determining, look indifferently upon the diverse opinions, and if we incline not our judgment to them, yet we easily give them the hearing. ~ Michel De Montaigne

We have lost the art of conversation. People are shy and don't know how to approach other people, and they are missing opportunities for relationships. And no one's entertaining at home anymore. They're not having people over for dinner. ~ Letitia Baldrige

The Art of Conversation could not die in Australia; it never lived. Television did not kill it; there was nothing there to kill. ~ George Mikes

It is difficult to give a recipe for successful conversation. But it would certainly include three fundamentals. Assemble good ingredients, mix and spice with your own thinking, and serve attractively.
To assemble the ingredients, read. Read lots of different things. Read newspapers that express a viewpoint contrary to your own; read periodicals that have thoughtful, provocative articles; read books that tell of places and persons of current interest; read fiction, of course, but not to the exclusion of all other things. ~ Helen Valentine

The art of conversation consist as much in listening politely, as in talking agreeably. ~ Hayley Atwell

The art of conversation is to be prompt without being stubborn, to refute without argument, and to clothe great matters in a motley garb. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

I'm adorable, first off. My sense of humor is stellar - obvs."
"Obvs," she echoes dryly.
"I'm extraordinarily skilled in the art of conversation."
She nods. "When it's about yourself, of course."
"Of course." I pretend to think it over some more. "Oh, and I'm a mind reader. No lie. I always know what the other person is thinking."
"Yeah? What am I thinking right now?" Allie challenges.
"That you want me to shut up and fuck you again."
She shakes her head in dismay. "Goddamn it. That's actually what I was thinking."
I smirk at her and tap my forehead. "Told ya. Mind reader. ~ Elle Kennedy

We are going to be a community of diverse people who do not think the same or live the same lifestyle, but if we are going to live together peaceably, we need to find a better way to disagree. ~ Eric Overby

Anyone who thinks the art of conversation is dead ought to tell a child to go to bed.
~ Robert Gallagher

They do not practise the art of conversation in quite the way the English do, but are straightforward to the point of bluntness. ~ Tracy Chevalier

Among the arts of conversation no one pleases more than mutual deference or civility, which leads us to resign our own inclinations to those of our companions, and to curb and conceal that presumption and arrogance so natural to the human mind. ~ David Hume

When you're at dinner with somebody and they are on their phone. I think there's that lost art of conversation and so I just always try to keep my phone far away from me when I'm with people. ~ Austin Butler

All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must
not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make ... let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds ... it will oftenest be seen that
he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous. ~ Blaise Pascal

One often reads about the art of conversation-how it's dying or what's needed to make it flourish, or how rare good ones are. But wouldn't you agree that the infinitely more valuable rara avis [rare bird] is a good listener. ~ Malcolm Forbes

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. ~ Chinua Achebe

She had lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The real amateur of wine can only enjoy it along with friends, sharing with them the art of conversation and the art of drinking. Wine is indeed essentially a sign of civilization, a factor of sociability, friendship. ~ Jean Drapeau

Sometimes, our conversations remind me of a dialogue between two memories. ~ Osvaldo Ferrari

Hosting is an art form. Like acting, singing, or comedy hosting is a craft. It's a delicate dance of timing, the ability to read the room, and the art of conversation. ~ Todd Newton

A survey reported that the majority of the seminaries [in the United States] had no classes on prayer. That really shouldn't surprise us when we consider how many local churches offer classes on gardening and the "Art of Conversation" instead of the study of God's Word and prayer. ~ Billy Graham

Real-life discussions involve a great many bores and boors who have never learned that the art of conversation demands listening as well as talking. ~ Susan Jacoby

I was not especially enthusiastic about opera when I was young, and I thought I would never write one. I felt it was an art form of the past, with expensive singers exposing their high notes, and bad theater, and ridiculous stories which don't concern us. But then little by little I realized that it can be defined very differently, that on the contrary opera can be something profound and not superficial - a wonderful meeting point for all the other arts. ~ Kaija Saariaho

True to a unique tradition of Rome, all the nearby walls had been slathered with that unique institution of the Latin race: graffiti. Daubed in paint of every color were slogans such as Death to the aristocrats! and The shade of Tribune Ateius calls out for blood! and May the curse of Ateius fall on Crassus and all his friends! All of this was scrawled wretchedly and spelled worse. Rome has an extremely high rate of literacy, mostly so that the citizens can practice this particular art form. ~ John Maddox Roberts

But the punishment-body relation is not the same as it was in the torture during public executions. The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property. The body, according to this penality, is caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions. Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. ~ Michel Foucault

I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,
if there were not a friend?
The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Naturally, I have no heroes: I am my heroes. I am my brothers and sisters. I feel myself joined by the soul with all beauty. My heart sings with every brave endeavour. With the strange wings of impossible butterflies, with every rock that breathes life into the world. I stand shoulder to shoulder with all denouncers of meanness. I honour spirit and faith and uphold the glorious amateur. I'm in love with desperate men with desperate hands, walking in second-hand shoes searching for God and hearing God and hating God. I'm a desperate man, buckled with fear, I am a desperate man who demands to be listened to, who demands to connect. I'm a desperate man who denounces the dullness of money and status. I'm a desperate man who will not bow down to accolade or success. I'm a desperate man who loves the simplicity of painting and hates galleries and white walls and the dealers in art. Who loves unreasonableness and hotheadedness, who loves contradiction, hates publishing houses and also I am Vincent Van Gogh, Hiroshige and every living artist who dares to draw God on this planet. ~ Billy Childish

The eye is the best of artists. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Silence of the Lambs screenwriter Ted Tally put the art of writing dialogue succinctly: 'What's important is not the emotion they're playing but the emotion they're trying to conceal. ~ John Yorke

My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. ~ Yann Martel

Among people, particularly those I love, I so easily get talking and give out everything possible in conversation, so that it is not available for my work. It is a stupid piece of clumsiness that I am so wanting in the gift of sociability, the talent for easy but at the same time recreative conversations, in which one does not exert and expend oneself (Letters 1906-1907, p. 118). ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Don't think of it as art, think of it as work. ~ Paddy Chayefsky

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought. ~ Agnes Repplier

I remember on a Friday afternoon getting a phone call from Grant Simmons saying, "Mike," we got to be pretty good friends; "Mike, the Sheriff is closing us down on Monday. If you'd like to drive into the studio tomorrow morning, you can have anything you want." So rather than go in and take home piles and piles of cels of Spider-Man what did I take home? Two pages of original art that got sent out to the west coast. Now of course if I'd have taken all the rest of that stuff home I could probably have retired a lot earlier. ~ Mike Royer

I always knew that I had to direct. That was something I'd wanted to do. Finally, I was just looking at the situation and I said, "I wanna document hip-hop, as an art form, seeing how a lot of people don't take it seriously." ~ Ice-T

I'm delighted with it, because it used to be that films were the lowest form of art. Now we've got something to look down on. ~ Billy Wilder

When you are on the ground, only one of you two can be comfortable at any one time. Either you are comfortable or the opponent is. Your job is to transfer the comfortable from him to you in every position ~ Rickson Gracie

I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay. ~ William Kentridge

It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you
they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less
but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon. ~ Walker Percy

Max had a book with her and began leafing through it, looking for something. "There's a passage our conversation reminds me of ..."
"What?"
"In the Upanishads -- a series of Sanskrit works which are part of the Veda. Here it is Pol, listen: In this body, in this town of Spirit, there is a little house shaped like a lotus, and in that house there is a little space. There is as much in that little space within the heart as there is in the whole world outside. Maybe that little space is the realty of your you and my me?"
"Could I copy that?" I asked.
"Of course. I've been watching that little space within your heart enlarging all year as more and more ideas are absorbed into it. Some people close their doors and lock them so that nothing can come in, and the space cannot hold anything as long as the heart clutches in self-protection or lust or greed. But if we're not afraid, that little space can be so large that one could put a whole universe in it and still have room for more. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

To have a museum like the Museum of Modern Art in New York is to have power. I don't have any interest in being the director of an institution that has power. ~ Luis Gonzalez

Reading is a privileged pleasure because each of us enjoys it, quite complexly, in ways not replicable by anyone else. But there is enough structural common ground in the text itself so that we can talk to each other, even sometimes persuade each other, about what we read: and that many-voiced conversation, with which, thankfully, we shall never have done, is one of the most gratifying responses to literary creation, second only to reading itself. ~ Robert Alter

Cats were the easiest of the beasts for humans to talk to, if you could call it talking, and most fairies could carry on some kind of colloquy with a cat. But conversations with cats were always more or less riddle games, and if you were getting the answer too quickly, the cat merely changed the ground on you. Katriona's theory was that cats were one of the few members of the animal kingdom who had a strong artistic sense, and that aggravated chaos was the chief feline art form, but she had never coaxed a straight enough answer out of a cat to be sure. ~ Robin McKinley

THERE ARE ENORMOUS HOLES IN MY EDUCATION. I left college in March of my freshman year and never went back. I've never read Moby-Dick and it's probably too late now. I know nothing about the history of music or the history of art except what I've learned through osmosis. But Outsider Art is its own context. I don't have to know all about the Impressionists or the Abstract Expressionists. I don't have to be able to fit this art into any historic chronology. I don't feel like an ignoramus. Irony of ironies, I don't feel like an outsider - to fall in love I only need eyes. ~ Abigail Thomas

Now, that is probably my least favorite topic of conversation in the entire world. I have spent a great part of my life hearing that doctrine talked up and down, and no one's understanding ever advanced one iota. I've seen grown men, God-fearing men, come to blows over that doctrine. The first thought that came to my mind was, Of course he would bring up predestination! ~ Marilynne Robinson

Art and theory of art, at one and the same time ; beauty and the secret of beauty ; cinema, and apologia for cinema. '
- Godard on Godard: Critical Writings ~ Jean-Luc Godard

When Joseph Smith, Jr. was there we had some conversation in which in every instance I did not fail to affirm that what I had said was strictly true. A dirty, nasty, filthy affair of his and Fanny Alger's was talked over in which I strictly declared that I had never deviated from the truth in the matter, and as I supposed was admitted by himself. ~ Oliver Cowdery

The ultimate function of art is to make men do what they want to do, as it is to make them recognize what they know. ~ Maurice Blondel

The idea of the culture that you live in determining meaning in your art, though, is a very important aspect of what art would be about. But that had more to do with the kind of general understanding of what the hell you're doing, you know. ~ Robert Barry

The art of this was to ignore all insults, all threats; to turn the other cheek. ~ Mario Puzo

When you talk about state of the art, that doesn't mean a damn thing. Think about it. State of the art. "This is the state of the art brush from Winsor-Newton." Yeah, but the state of the art sucks rubber donkey lungs. ~ Mike Royer

We are all the subjects of impressions, and some of use seek to convey the impressions to others. In the art of communicating impressions lies the power of generalizing without losing that logical connection of parts to the whole which satisfies the mind. ~ Camille Pissarro

You do understand, Sara. More than you know. More than I wish you did." His mouth closes down over mine, hot with demand, and I know he believes this conversation is over, that he means to end it with the wicked caress of his tongue against mine, the possessive splay of his hands on my body. But I refuse to be this powerless, to be silenced with the very passion that drives me to need to understand this man. "No," I gasp, and shove against him, breathless as I meet his gaze and demand, "Make me understand, Chris." And on some level I know this is that unknown place I've craved to go with him, that place he hides from me, that place he wants to take me. This is where we have to go, where we've always been headed. ~ Lisa Renee Jones

Imagine that you are agonizing over a choice - which career to pursue, whether to get married, how to vote, what to wear that day. You have finally staggered to a decision when the phone rings. It is the identical twin you never knew you had. During the joyous conversation it comes out that she has just chosen a similar career, has decided to get married at around the same time, plans to cast her vote for the same presidential candidate, and is wearing a shirt of the same color - just as the behavioral geneticists who tracked you down would have bet. How much discretion did the "you" making the choices actually have if the outcome could have been predicted in advance, at least probabilistically, based on events that took place in your mother's Fallopian tubes decades ago? ~ Steven Pinker

The line has almost become a work of art in itself. ~ Theo Van Doesburg