THE BIBLE ON SPEECH
How forcible are right words!
To every thing there is a season, a time to keep silence, and a time to
speak.
Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.
Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which
is good to the use of edifying.
Be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.
Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may
know how ye ought to answer every man.
Be ye holy in all manner of conversation.
Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking,
be put away from you.
Know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary.
Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable
in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.
THOUGHTS ON TALKING
To make a good talker, genius and learning, even wit and eloquence, are
insufficient; to these, in all or in part, must be added in some degree
the talents of active life. The character has as much to do with
colloquial power as has the intellect; the temperament, feelings, and
animal spirits, even more, perhaps, than the mental gifts. "Napoleon
said things which tell in history like his battles. Luther's Table-Talk
glows with the fire that burnt the Pope's bull." Caesar, Cicero,
Themistocles, Lord Bacon, Selden, Talleyrand, and, in our own country,
Aaron Burr, Jefferson, Webster, and Choate, were all, more or less, men
of action.
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