"Spoken word" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... However, Mrs. Seaton, I am able and willing to defend my customary mode of speech. You realize that the spoken word is ephemeral, whereas the thought, whose nuances have once been expressed in imperishable print is not subject to revision—its crudities can never be remodeled into more subtle, more gracious shading. It is my contention that, due to these inescapable ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... spoken word, the thing became clear to Zaidos. All at once he knew how deeply and utterly his cousin hated him. He knew as well as if Velo had shouted it aloud that he meant to be the instrument of his death in some way or other, sooner or later. And ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... Bassanio's other words, "Madam, you have bereft me of all speech." From the presence of Evaleen he received access of eloquence; the two were conscious of a silent interchange of sentiments more meaningful than any spoken word. While Evaleen sat listening with responsive interest to some frank personal disclosures of the young man's hopes and ambitions, her attention was diverted by a slight sound on the porch. She glanced up, and saw, or thought she saw, an ugly face staring at her through a window-pane. ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... hour, this night is among its fellows what a hallowed temple is among other buildings—what the fervent sun is among the other lights of heaven. You know not how I feel, nay, I hardly know myself. Not now, not now, one lightly-spoken word!" ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... from telephone experimentation to the search for the wireless. He grounded his wires and sent high currents into the earth, but improved his system and took another step toward the final achievement by adding a large induction coil to his sending equipment. He suggested that the spoken word might be sent as well as dots and dashes, and so sought the wireless telephone as well as the wireless telegraph. Like his predecessors, his experiments were successful ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... humbled thy heart with penitence',— If Nature's voices have spoken to thee With her holy meanings eloquently',— If every creature hath won thy love', From the creeping worm to the brooding dove',— If never a sad, low-spoken word Hath pled with thy human heart unheard',— Then', when the night steals on, as now, It will bring relief to thine aching brow, And, with joy and peace at the thought of rest, Thou wilt sink to sleep on thy ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... the battered tramp, came gladly the men of power—the men whose spoken word in their polyglot domains was more feared and heeded than decrees of emperors or edicts of kings. And there, in the time-blackened cabin that had once been his cabin, these men talked and the girl listened while her eyes glowed ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... The spoken Word, the written Poem, is said to be an epitome of the man; how much more the done Work. Whatsoever of morality and of intelligence; what of patience, perseverance, faithfulness, of method, insight, ingenuity, energy; in a word, whatsoever of Strength the man ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... he shouted at the top of his lungs to make himself heard above the roar of the wind. And then it seemed to the girl they rode on and on for hours without a spoken word. She came to tell by the force of the wind whether they travelled along ridges, or wide low basins, or narrow coulees. Her lips dried and cracked, and the fine dust and sand particles were driven beneath her clothing ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... time they watched the dancing camp fire flames in silence, as though they had found in their love that true oneness that needs no spoken word. ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... much, and seem to miss much and advance little; so that in what relates to the mere present it were wrong, possibly, to challenge the sally of the statesman who, from his own helpless height, looked down on our weakness. But inasmuch as no man knoweth the end of the spoken word, as that which is spoken to-day, earnestly and simply, may not reappear for years, and may then appear with force and quality of hidden virtue, there is reason for our uniting together beyond the proof of necessity ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... must follow was one which the Count was anxious not to see. He therefore turned his back and pretended to brush from his sleeve a speck of dust revealed to his searching eye in the strong afternoon light which streamed through the open door. Then Vjera's low-spoken word of thanks and her light tread made him aware that she had received her little gratuity; he stood politely aside while she passed out, and then went down the half-dozen steps with her. As they began to move up the street, he did not offer her ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... true that he brings the balista of the law to work, and looks for the weapons in the armory of judicial contradictions, but he keeps his own convictions as to the case, while he does his best to gain the day. In a word, a man loses his head not so much by thinking as by uttering thoughts. The spoken word convinces the utterer; but a man can act against his own bad judgment without warping it, and contrive to win in a bad cause without maintaining that it is a good one, like the barrister. Perhaps for this very reason an old attorney is the more likely of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... down to the falls; days with lunches in the rose-garden, and Abt and Schubert songs under the pines at twilight, when their hands touched in the exchange of a flower or a book and lingered in the touching; when their eyes had learned the answering of each other with no spoken word. And the question and answer were the same in the Garden of Eden, before man and woman made their first great mistake and did the thing that was ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... to the new programme of schooling so adorably that Dick could hardly restrain himself from picking her up then and there and carrying her off to the nearest registrar's office. It was the implicit obedience to the spoken word and the blank indifference to the unspoken desire that baffled and buffeted his soul. He held authority in that house,—authority limited, indeed, to one-half of one afternoon in seven, but very real while it lasted. Maisie ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... my cards on the table, and indulged in a pantomime more graphic than spoken word. He shut his eyes, laid his cheek on one hand, and gave a groan of intense disgust, followed by certain gleeful chuckles, made the more expressive by the sly jerking of his thumb towards the dining room door and the bobbing up and down of his fore-finger ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... fly!" but the effect in generating kinetic energy is said to be amazing. A human body, like a mass of dynamite, contains a store of energy in unstable equilibrium, ready to be directed in this direction or that by a disturbance which is physically very small, such as a spoken word. In all such cases the reduction of behaviour to physical laws can only be effected by entering into great minuteness; so long as we confine ourselves to the observation of comparatively large masses, the way in which ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... more like a sigh than a spoken word, and it seemed to her as if in the utterance of that syllable the three thousand pounds had ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... than his repentance, apology or sentiment, all of which he would have offered as sops to her pride, and none of which could have been genuine. His departure without seeing her meant that he had believed her spoken word rather than that which had been written in silence, the testimony of her drooping figure and ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... time when men had no means of communication at all. And at last, after long ages, men evolved in sound the names of the things they knew and the forms of speech; ages later, the alphabet and the art of writing; ages later still, those wonderful instruments of extension for the written and spoken word: the telegraph, the telephone, the modern printing press, the phonograph, the typewriter, and ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... Johnson's orotund prose, of the declamatory Letters of Junius, and of the speeches of Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our early Congresses. The fame of a great orator, like that of a great actor, is largely traditionary. The spoken word transferred to the printed page loses the glow which resided in the man and the moment. A speech is good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to the end which is sought. But the fact that this ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... between soul and body, or more generally between spiritual and material, has been illustrated by the connection between the meaning of a sentence and the written or spoken word conveying that meaning. The writing or the speaking may be regarded as an incarnation of the meaning, a mode of stating or exhibiting its essence. As delivered, the sentence must have time relations; it has a beginning, middle, ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... learn to face the homeward walk with steady nerves, others grow used to the swift approach, the rapidly spoken word, and receive them with set, stony face and deaf ears; but oh, the terror and the shame of it at first! And this horror of the night takes so many forms that it is hard to say which one is the most revolting—hard to decide between the vile innuendo whispered by a sober brute ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... the ordinary type of action, but we have already indicated a different type. In speaking of typewriting we said the stimulus might be either the copy or ideas. One can write from copy or dictation, in which the stimulus is the written or spoken word, but one can also write as one thinks of what one wishes to write. The latter is known as centrally initiated action. That is to say, the stimulus comes from within, in the brain, rather than ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... Spartacus presents is of universal value—the spirit of liberty, dear to all mankind. This value must be realized by the student, who must make the effort of Spartacus his own effort, throughout the entire selection. The value of the theme must be behind every spoken word, felt, if not uttered. ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... Riley Your Nature-on the surface—was Simple, Honest, Open, Direct. It was all of that but—it was More! It was deeper than Tears! It was wider than Laughter! It was more profound, more subtle, than either your spoken Word. or, your written, your printed Thought. You were infinitely better than the Very Best that you ever did! High Praise, but True! Your nature was ...
— A Spray of Kentucky Pine • George Douglass Sherley
... the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, so distinctly that no utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be conscious of the same thought, in which one or both take the profoundest interest; ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to kill thee, mad boy," said Long Robin coolly, as though he had heard the spoken word. "I am going to kill thee, as I kill all those who dare to thwart my will or cross my path. I shall kill thee; but thou shalt first have the desire of thine eyes and of thine heart. Thou shalt see and thou shalt touch the long-lost treasure! Thou shalt learn the secret ere thou diest, and thy ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... how perfect is the correspondence between the Sacraments and the method of life where they are the agents, and which they symbolically set forth. There is in each case the material form and the spiritual substance, or energy. Water, chrism, oil, the spoken word, the touch of hands, the sign of the cross, and finally and supremely the bread and wine of the Holy Eucharist. Each a material thing, but each representing, signifying and containing some gift of the Holy Spirit, real, absolute and potent. So matter and ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... electromotive force in them, and if a closed path is provided by the line, a current will flow. This current is an alternating one having a frequency the same as the sound causing it. As in speech the frequencies vary constantly, many pitches constituting even a single spoken word, so the alternating voice currents are of great varying complexity, and every fundamental frequency has its ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... of the inquirer than a lucid and simple exposition of the Faith. Controversy beclouds the issue. Were there any particular doubt in mind, the Question-box affords an opportunity to elucidate it. The distribution of literature will confirm the message of the spoken word and continue to carry on its work, helping the seed to germinate in God's own time. Inquiry classes and information bureaus are of a great help to those who are reluctant yet to meet a priest, or to be known ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... in secrecy and disguise from a pledge which you have given in the face of God and your fellow-men? Of what wrongs will you complain, when you yourself are breaking the simplest law that lies at the foundation of the trust which binds man to man—faithfulness to the spoken word? This, then, is the wisdom you have gained by scorning the mysteries of the Church?—not to see the bare duty of integrity, where the Church would have taught you to see, not ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... that he saw was, nevertheless, hard, cold, and repellent. For Hilda, in her beauty and grace and intellectual subtilty, stood there watchful and vigilant, like a keen fencer on guard, waiting to see what the first spoken word might disclose; waiting to see what that grand lordly face, with its air of command, its repressed grief, its deep piercing ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... cold, and yet without a spoken word both girls stopped and stared about them as soon as they reached ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... greeting, with conventional nothings their beautiful hostess; who, with a charming air of triumphant—but not too triumphant—proprietorship received them and passed them on, with a low spoken word to Aaron King; "I will ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... had been made more sensible of the heaviness, and often the ugliness, of Wagnerian declamation by Corinne, had for some time been debating whether it was not nonsense and an offense against nature to harness and yoke together the spoken word and the word sung in the theater: it was like harnessing a horse and a bird to a cart. Speech and singing each had its rhythm. It was comprehensible that an artist should sacrifice one of the two arts to the triumph of that which he preferred. But to try to find ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... unseen world, and walked in such uninterrupted fellowship with the unseen God, that the exchange of worlds became too real for him to mourn for those who had made it, or to murmur at the infinite Love that numbers our days. It moved men more deeply than any spoken word of witness to see him manifestly borne ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... spoken word of admonition from parents, teachers, and others honestly interested in our welfare we should reinforce our good resolves by reading good books and in framing for our own benefit a code of ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... having the cooperation of the local women. In the evening street meetings were held. The workers left literature in every home and posters placarded on every wall space. They left suffrage stories with the newspapers and the spoken word in the ear of all who would listen and they left the morale of the local workers at high water mark. The signed petitions were printed and mailed to the voters in each county with our final circularization. Ninety-eight per cent. of the newspapers ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... asked him questions which he had not been able to answer on the spur of the moment. It was easy for him, in his first letter, to hark back to one of those idle questions of hers, and to make his reply to it an excuse for a letter. Such a communication would need no acknowledgment beyond a spoken word of thanks, which she would bestow upon him the next time they met. It should contain nothing warmer than the assurance of his anxiety to be of service to her, in anything she undertook, and a protestation of respectful friendship ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... who took everybody at the spoken word, Richard never thought of seeking Dorothy again at their former place of meeting. Nor, in the new enthusiasm born in him, did his thoughts for a good many days turn to her so often, or dwell so much upon her, as to cause any keen ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... thought, they have anchored their craft securely in the past. No writer that has handled prose or verse with a high seriousness has offended against the practice of the masters—save only Walt Whitman. The written word and the spoken word differ even more widely in America than elsewhere. The spoken word threw off the trammels of an uneasy restraint at the very outset. The written word still obeys the law of gradual development, which has always controlled ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... presence had become charged with mystery for them. They had no doubt that the blessed St. Yvon, the patron saint of mariners, had himself uttered the warning through her, at the moment when the safety of the fishing fleet depended on a spoken word: and the miracle now occupied their attention almost to the exclusion of the false lights and the return of ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... nothing but myself between him and the dark ocean. I had a sense of responsibility. If I spoke, would that motionless and suffering youth leap into the obscurity—clutch at the straw? I found out how difficult it may be sometimes to make a sound. There is a weird power in a spoken word. And why the devil not? I was asking myself persistently while I drove on with my writing. All at once, on the blank page, under the very point of the pen, the two figures of Chester and his antique partner, very distinct and complete, would ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... spoken word Man's Spirit stirred Beyond his belly-need, What is is Thine of fair design In thought and craft and deed; Each stroke aright of toil and fight, That was and that shall be, And hope too high, wherefore we die, Has birth and ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... of the kind, for they had danced together a great deal; but they had always danced in silence. At the time, with his arm about her, silence had seemed enough; but in separation there is something wonderfully solid and comforting in the memory of a spoken word; it is like a coin in the pocket. And after Miss Severance had bidden him good night at the long glass door of the paneled ball-room without his saying anything of a future meeting, she had gone up-stairs with a heavy heart ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... the spoken word does not carry far enough: hence the institution of gongs and drums. Nor can ordinary objects be seen clearly enough: hence the institution of banners and flags. 24. Gongs and drums, banners and flags, ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... and wound her arm about the tiny frame which held this brave true heart, and without another spoken word the two went swiftly down the stairs, and entered the silent, solemn parlor. Yet, even while she went, a fierce throb of pain shook Ester's heart, as she remembered how they had arranged to descend the staircase on this very day—in ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... Heath, and from the heights of Sydenham to Highgate is embraced the chief of those places which are continually referred to in the written or spoken word ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... father or mother, wife or child, and even made such a love a condition of what He called discipleship. The greatest marvel of all human history is that this prognostication has been strictly verified in the event. He is the Supreme Lover, for whose love, unrealizable as it is by touch, or glance, or spoken word, or momentary presence, men and women are still willing to sacrifice themselves, and surrender all things. The pregnant words of Napoleon, uttered in his last lonely reveries in St. Helena, still express the strangest thing in universal history: "Caesar, Charlemagne, ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... panther-hide. 460 Moreover, from the threshold step goes either watchful ward, Two dogs to wit, that follow close the footsteps of their lord. So to the chamber of his guest the hero goes his way, Well mindful of his spoken word and that well-promised stay. Nor less AEneas was afoot betimes that morning-tide, And Pallas and Achates went each one their lord beside. So met, they join their right hands there and in the house sit down, And win the joy of spoken words, ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... language is a better instrument than language by sign; therefore one is freer to express his thought and impress it upon the mind of another by speech than by gesture. The written word is a more potent instrument than the spoken word; therefore one is freer to act on the mind of his fellows when he knows how to picture the word to their eyes than when he simply knows how to speak it. The press is an instrument two or three hundred times more potent than the pen; ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... hurriedly and guardedly, as if they mistrusted each other. In each of them two entities were now apparent—a surface consciousness, which talked and acted mechanically, and a secondary inner consciousness, watchful, and fearful of misinterpretation of the spoken word. The faculties which make up the human mind are different and complex, and mysteriously blended. It may be that when tragedy upsets the frail structure of human life the brute instincts of watchfulness and self-preservation come uppermost, guarding against chance suspicion, or the loud word ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... as an affectation) as in America. Loud hallelujahs have been raised in praise of Moussorgsky because, discarding conventional law, he vitalized the music of the lyric poem and also the dramatic line, by making it the emotional flowering of the spoken word. When it became necessary for the precious inner brotherhood of Frenchmen who hold burning incense sticks under each others' noses to acclaim "Pelleas et Melisande" as a new and beautiful thing in dramatic music, it was announced that Moussorgsky was like ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... important matters of feeling as of reason, of experience as of reflection, should be treated of only by word of mouth. The spoken word at once dies if it is not kept alive by some other word following on it and suited to the hearer. Observe what happens in social converse. If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... me and whether my spoken word 'is required or no," she said, "but if it will be any satisfaction to you to ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... motor aphasia, that the subject hears and understands a spoken word—fully perceives it—and yet cannot pronounce it himself. And at that, there need be no paralysis of the speech organs. The brain injury has affected the motor speech-cooerdinating machinery, and deprived the individual of ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... these details with grim humor. Now the tall Holderness, face shining, gold-red beard agleam, rounded the cabin whistling. Hare watched the rustlers sit down to breakfast, and here and there caught a loud-spoken word, and marked their leisurely care-free manner. Snap Naab took up a pan of food and a cup of coffee, carried them into the cabin, and came out, shutting ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... was an over-fondness for German, French, and English words. Between them the two friends, by force of their great genius, cleared away the debris which made for sterility and erected in their stead a new structure out of living Russian words. The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into an effete body, blew his own virile ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... for this divine Love that ever waits for the spoken word in order to be revealed. To Jesus it was the dearest and best name of all by which to address or speak to the one great Helper, Guide, Friend. 'Father, I thank thee,' was often on his lips, and it was to the 'Father who seeth in secret' that he ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... Smallbones "weighed out" amid a circle of smiles, which suddenly seemed to light up the entire bar-room. Nor had he a single spoken word of protest. But he yielded himself up to the demands of the masterful doctor only to save himself the ducking he was ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... did falsehood pass his lips, his mouth was equal to his seal and his spoken word to his written. Loyal as fine gold and whole as an egg." Chastellain repeats himself somewhat in the profusion of his eulogy, but such are the main points of his characterisation. Then he proceeds ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... invention of speaking itself, the most important invention for the poet has been the invention of writing and reading; for this has added immensely to the scope of his mastery over words. No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded. But he trusts his reader to do as he himself does—to receive written words always as the code of spoken words. To do so has wonderfully enlarged his technical opportunities; for apprehension is quicker and ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... task of peace propaganda in Germany is gigantic. Neither by letter nor by Press can news be spread. Both are censored. The work must be carried on by spoken word passed from mouth to mouth. The courage of the little band of women I had met was stupendous. Through them I learned to love Germany. So my life in Berlin became a double one. I ate and slept, and was unregenerate in one part of the town, ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... haggler. . . . But you have never comprehended me, not even in the old days when we loved each other. For instance, do you understand—slave of a spoken word!—what it must mean to me to know that at this hour to-morrow there will be alive in Venaissin no ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... over a great number of particularisms, and that these particularisms may return. The empire of the Germans may break up again. That I do not believe. The forces that unified Germany lie deeper than the Hohenzollern adventure; print, paper and the spoken word have bound Germany now into one people for all time. None the less those previous crowns and symbols that still show through the paint of the new design may help greatly, as that weakens under the ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... eyesight, to be deaf to the multiplex noises which are evidently blind, and to think what they find thinkablest on such a subject. For, were it never so just, proper and needful, this is by nature a case of LYNCH LAW; upon which, in the way of approval or apology, no spoken word is permissible. Lynch being so dangerous a Lawgiver, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... seems to me, that one may do, is to love people, if one can. It is the mood from which sympathy and help spring that matters, not the spoken word or the material aid. In the worst troubles one cannot help people at all. The knowledge that others love you does not fill the aching gap made by the death of child or lover or friend. And now too, in these democratic days, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... therefore, to see that our thoughts as well as our words are such as to add to the happiness of those about us. Calmness and carefulness will accomplish this. Let us guard well against the ill-spoken word, however harmless it ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... are disjointed; there is a fine tremor in the writing, and inco-ordination in the movements of the pen. Silent thoughts leave out syllables and words in the framing of sentences; consequently they are not expressed by the hand. The ideation of a written or spoken word is based upon the association of the component syllables, and the difficulty arises primarily from the progressive impairment of this function of association upon which spoken and written language so largely depends. Examination of the brain in this disease explains the cause ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... while his heart beat and words rose clamorously to his lips,—the words of rebellion, of protest and love, the words of youth. But he said nothing,—it was better that they should part without a spoken word,—better for her and better for him. His feeling for her, compact of tenderness, pity, and belief, had never been tested by any clear light. She was not his; and beyond that fact he ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... a truly groundless fear—like wondering whether there will ever be a race with only one arm or one leg, or a race of people who live only by the eye or by the ear. The difference between the written word and the spoken word is the difference between solitude and companionship, between meditation and something so near action that it is at least halfway to action and creates action. It is perfectly supposable to imagine a whole race of authors of whom not one should ever exchange a word with a human being while ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... solemn to me is the responsibility of the public teacher, standing forth in Press and on platform to partly mould the thought of his time, swaying thousands of readers and hearers year after year. No weighter responsibility can any take, no more sacred charge. The written and the spoken word start forces none may measure, set working brain after brain, influence numbers unknown to the forthgiver of the word, work for good or for evil all down the stream of time. Feeling the greatness of the career, the solemnity of the duty, I pledged my ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... thee, and thou didst listen. But now, when I was not by thee to stay thy hand, thou hast dug a pit for thine own feet to fall in. Is it not so? But what is done is done. Who can make the dead tree green, or gaze again upon last year's light? Who can recall the spoken word, or bring back the spirit of the fallen? That which Time swallows comes not up again. Let it ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... That's your talking, is it? If you don't stand to your spoken word, holy father, I'll make my own complaint to the mitred bishop in the face of all. PRIEST. You'd do that! SARAH. I would surely, holy father, if I walked to the city of Dublin with blood and blisters on my naked feet. PRIEST — uneasily scratching ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... power is the power of dialogue, and dialogue, of course, is as often employed in the service of the story as in the service of the play. Yet it is not difficult to understand how in Lady Gregory the dialogue and in Mr. Yeats the love of the spoken word led, when opportunity was made, to writing for the stage, and for success on the stage. But in the case of "A.E." it is as difficult to find a foreshadowing of the playwright in the mystical poet as it would be to see in all but all of the essays of "The Treasure of the Humble," ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... to every Anglo-Orientalist as the old and trusty companion of his studies early and late; but even here I have made sundry deviations for reasons which will be explained in the Terminal Essay. As words are the embodiment of ideas and writing is of words, so the word is the spoken word; and we should write it as pronounced. Strictly speaking, the e-sound and the o-sound (viz. the Italian o-sound not the English which is peculiar to us and unknown to any other tongue) are not found in Arabic, except when ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... behind, they followed him to a poor home in a little street, saw him enter, saw the light flash up and knew that he was living out in deed the doctrine he preached. Silent, they turned away. What his spoken word in The Temple could not do his ministry at midnight had accomplished, and they became loyal and ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... editor's dreams come true, so Naylor rubbed the lamp for him and told him what he craved. But the reporter's success in life had been won by an ability to combine much extravagance of statement in the written with great conservatism in the spoken word. Early in his experience he had learned that Naylor's optimism, though purely professional, entailed unpleasant consequences on the reporter who shared it and then betrayed some too generous trust; so he absolutely refused ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... intelligent man; sometimes educated, nearly always fearless and resourceful. He knew the one sure basis on which men of alien blood and far separated stages of moral and intellectual development can meet in understanding—namely, the truth of the spoken word. He recognized honor as the bond of trade and the warp and woof of human intercourse. The uncorrupted savage also had his plain interpretation of the true word in the mouths of men, and a name for it. He called it the "Old Beloved Speech"; and he gave ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... all such. They condemn also the Samosatenes, old and new, who, contending that there is but one Person, sophistically and impiously argue that the Word and the Holy Ghost are not distinct Persons, but that "Word" signifies a spoken word, and "Spirit" signifies motion ...
— The Confession of Faith • Various
... come not back; The arrow sent upon its track— It will not swerve, it will not stay Its speed; it flies to wound or slay; The spoken word, so soon forgot By thee, but it has perished not; In other hearts 'tis living still, And doing work for good or ill; And the lost opportunity That cometh back no more to thee. In vain thou weep'st, in vain dost yearn, These three will never ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... to her feet with a little cry, and he did likewise. Back of them had sounded an exclamation—it was more like the snort of a wild animal than a spoken word—and there, ten feet away, stood a tall, copper-colored negress, her eyes blazing, her nostrils dilated, a look of utmost fury upon her face. She was fully as tall as Kirk, gaunt, hook-nosed, and ferocious. About her head was bound a gaudy Barbadian head-dress, its tips ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... ancient seat of the Tabernacle, meets the ambitious young officer in some solitary spot, with the message which answered to his secret thoughts and made his heart beat fast. The symbolic action preceding the spoken word, as usual, supplied the text, of which the word was the explanation and expansion. How pathetic is the newness of the garment! Unworn, strong, and fresh, it yet is rent in pieces. So the kingdom is so recent, with such possibilities of duration, and yet it must be shattered! Thus quickly has ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the spoken word and the whistled innuendo followed her like a trail of bubbles in the wake of a flying-fish. A youth still wearing a fraternity pin pretended to lick his downy chops. The son of the president of the Mound City Oil Company emitted a long, amorous whistle. Willie ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... few moments had elapsed since Jeanne Lacombie had burst into the room. Moments so tense—so laden with terrible portent—that, although every person in the room heard each spoken word, brains failed to grasp their significance; and Appleton, from his bench near the door, as he saw Bill Carmody turn from his fainting wife, for the ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... of the Dewey's serious dilemma. No spoken word was necessary to impress upon the men the critical situation. Sleep was out of the question. Jack rambled into the wireless room, where he tried to calm his restless spirits by rattling away on the key at the code alphabet. Lately he had been giving much attention ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... lips pierced through him like the point of the bitter sword, And he deemed that death were better than another spoken word: But he clencheth his hand on the war-blade, and setteth his face as the brass, And the voice of his brother Gunnar from out his lips doth pass: "When thou lookest on me, O Goddess, thou seest Gunnar the King, The King and the lord of the Niblungs, and the ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... immodesty and its pretensions. And whether that was art, or sheer expression of the truth within her rather than a recognition of the truth without, Tess never quite determined; for it is easier to judge spoken word and unexpected deed than to see the thought behind it. That night Yasmini's mood was simpler and less unseemly than the very virgin dress ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... are even more applicable to the training of men's souls to rational self-expression. Dr. Curry will some day be recognized to have been an educational philosopher for having championed principles no less true of the spoken word than of every form of creative self-expression."—Dean Shailer ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... (2) Though the Apologists believed in the divine origin of the revelation given to the prophets, on which all knowledge of truth is based, they could nevertheless not be induced by this idea to represent God himself as a direct actor. For that revelation presupposes a speaker and a spoken word; but it would be an impossible thought to make the fulness of all essence and the first cause of all things speak. The Deity cannot be a speaking and still less a visible person, yet according to the testimony of ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... is nonsense." But in order that his spoken word might not sound stern to her, he took her in ...
— Returning Home • Anthony Trollope
... you take any account of the world, and anything it may do, whether good or evil? What injury can the world render, what help can it offer, so long as you hold the treasure of the Word? Observe that the apostle ascribes to the spoken Word, the preached Gospel, the power to save souls. Similarly, Paul commends it to the Romans (ch. 1, 16), in almost the same words, as "the power of God unto salvation to ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... often love at first sight; no prolonged acquaintance is necessary; not even a spoken word, or ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... the wisest teacher of all in such matters—all of which helped the constant nervous and psychological strain on both as little as a Latin exorcism would help a fever. For the very reason that they wished to be true in their love, they said things in their letters that a spoken word or a gesture would have explained in an instant but that no printed alphabet could; and so they often hurt each other while meaning and trying to ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... I saw her cheek and forehead Change, as at a spoken word, And I saw her head uplifted Like ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... years; but still it is interesting to me to recall that this was the beginning of the public speaking of the man who later addressed more audiences than any other orator of his time and made a deeper impression by his spoken word. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... said the Booshalloch, "you have spoken word to cost your life—any allusion to skins or hides, or especially to deer and does—may incur no less a forfeit. The chief is young, and jealous of his rank; none knows the reason better than thou, friend Glover. ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... are empty thrones. It is for you to fill them. . . . You are as Moses praying on the mountain, so ask Me for labourers and they shall be sent. I only await a prayer, a sigh! Is not the apostolate of prayer—so to speak—higher than that of the spoken word? It is for us by prayer to train workers who will spread the glad tidings of the Gospel and who will save countless souls—the souls to whom we shall be the spiritual Mothers. What, then, have we to envy in the ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... we are justified in saying that discursive thought can be realized in language only. One instance will make this clear. We hold that we cannot think without language. But can we not count without language? We certainly can. We can form the conception of three without any spoken word, by simply holding up three fingers. In the same manner, the hand might stand for five, both hands for ten, hands and feet for twenty.(25) This is how people who possessed no organs of speech would speak; this is how the deaf and dumb do speak. Three fingers are as good as three strokes, three ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... means "sacred writing") have played such a very great role in history, (a few of them in modified form have even found their way into our own alphabet,) you ought to know something about the ingenious system which was used fifty centuries ago to preserve the spoken word for the benefit of the ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... cavalier was an exceedingly honorable man and valued his spoken word. So on the occasion of a great conventicle at Mitchelslacks, in the parish of Closeburn, he permitted a great field meeting to disperse, drawing off his party in another direction, because the signal streaming from a staff told him the man who had spared his life was ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... when it was an aphorism that not what is said but what is done on the stage is the essential thing. This of course is at once true and false, like every other truism. Without action there can be no play; and a play may be made fairly intelligible without a single spoken word, just as a scene from history or fiction may be quite recognisably depicted in a few symbolic lines, dots, and dashes, though no single human ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... other assured him, "and, yes, you are truly among friends." But the lieutenant glanced upward in wonder, for he knew that he had uttered no spoken word. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... diverting the spectator's attention are various. There is the use of the eyes, as before shown. Then there is the spoken word, the performer telling the onlookers to observe some certain object or action, and the effect is to cause them to watch it, as they are told. They follow the line of least resistance. The combined effect upon the spectator of the spoken word ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... the ear to listen to anything new; we hear strange music badly. When we hear another language spoken, we involuntarily attempt to form the sounds into words with which we are more familiar and conversant—it was thus, for example, that the Germans modified the spoken word ARCUBALISTA into ARMBRUST (cross-bow). Our senses are also hostile and averse to the new; and generally, even in the "simplest" processes of sensation, the emotions DOMINATE—such as fear, love, hatred, and the passive emotion of indolence.—As little ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... has been spent over the question whether the Chinese hieroglyphs are ideograms or phonograms, whether the character , for instance, conveys to those using it primarily the idea of Heaven, or the spoken word T'ien. It is necessarily both, in a sense; it would not be written language otherwise. And it is equally true that the letter-combination Heaven is in a way as much to us a picture of the idea as of ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... be hereinafter described, is not the sole surviving relic of the Good Duke's rule. Turn where you please on this island domain, memories of that charming and incisive personality will meet your eye and ear; memories in stone-schools, convents, decayed castles and bathing chalets; memories in the spoken word—proverbs attributed to him, legends and traditions of his sagacity that still linger among the populace. IN THE DAYS OF THE DUKE: so runs a local saying, much as we speak of the "good old times." His amiable ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... has more of the humanities than any other. You will say: "But I have here authors just as learned, whose works I can read." Granted, but you can always read an author, while you cannot always listen to him. Moreover, as the proverb goes, the spoken word is invariably much more impressive than the written one; for however lively what you read may be, it does not sink so deeply into the mind as what is pressed home by the accent, the expression, and the whole bearing and action of a speaker. This must be admitted unless we think ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... without spoken word, he brought the thrilling conviction that he was hungering for her. The light in his eyes, the overwhelming ardor of his embrace, the magnetic force that leaped the intervening space while yet they were separated by half ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... lioness without a tongue, and placed it near the entrance to the Acropolis, signifying her dauntless courage by the nobleness of that animal, and by its being without a tongue her silence and fidelity. For no spoken word has done as much good as many unspoken ones. For at some future day we can give utterance if we like to what has been not said, but a word once spoken cannot be recalled, but flies about and runs all round the world. And this is the reason, I take it, why men teach us to speak, but ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... to do and be exactly what Lydia Sessions seemed to want. Gray Stoddard's occasional spoken word, or the more lengthy written messages he had taken to putting in the books he sent her, seemed to demand of her nothing, but always inspired to much. For all his disposition to keep hands off the personal ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... pathological decay. What Greece does is generally subtle and shrewd; what she says is often madness. She has little sense of humour, and takes offence where other nations would laugh. Thus she wins by statecraft and loses by politics. In thought, and in the spoken word, Greece is outmatched for instance by the Slavs; but in silent action and in administrative policy Greece more often excels her neighbours. You will always hear odious comparisons made in the Near East between Greek and Turk, to the disadvantage of the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... print. This is exactly what our friends the spelling reformers appear to have forgotten. The name that they have given to what they propose to do, indicates this clearly. When a word as written and as spoken have drifted apart, it is usually the spoken word that has changed. Reform, therefore, would be accomplished by restoring the old spoken form. Instead of this, it is proposed to change the written form. In other words, the two languages are to be forced ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... to be selected for appointments. Amid a most distinguished silence the winning names were read out. Waves of most undignified but inevitable emotion passed over those assembled as the list neared its end, and the chances of success became less at each spoken word; and then, finding that his was not among them, together with the greater part of those present, he became a prey to very inelegant thoughts, which were not lessened by the refined cries of triumph of the successful persons. Among this confusion the one who had read the lists was observed ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... practical persons would consider man from the utilitarian rather than from the scientific point of view; a maker of hats would single out the dimensions of the head from among other human characteristics; an orator would consider man from the point of view of his susceptibility to the spoken word. But selection is the fundamental necessity which enables us to realize things; to emerge from the vague into the practical, from aimless contemplation into ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... The spoken word hung halting on the lips, carrying a half-framed thought in its train. It was an accepted fact among the citizens that Fualdes, the liberal Protestant, a former official of the Empire, had been annoyed by threats against his life. The dark fancies spun ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... yet, what a complete understanding can exist between my sister and me, though no spoken word—perhaps hardly as much as a look—may have passed between us. She not only feels as I have described, but she very well knows that I am taking this opportunity of speaking to you, both for her ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... tenderly spoken word revealed to Percy Edwards a hidden treasure in the love of a woman, worthy, truly worthy of a full reciprocation. Her heart was open and panting before him. Alas! for the man, that he could not prize the untold ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... little time to think; but thought flies fast when such deadly peril menaces the thinker as that which I must face if I failed to make terms with the man who was in my power. I knew that notwithstanding his intensely disagreeable nature, if he gave his promise either by spoken word or equivalent sign, I could depend upon him. There were no liars in Brande's Society. But the word I could not trust him to say. I must have ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... success so long as the country was inhabited by simple farmers who lived at home and grew everything they needed upon their own fields. But gradually Egypt became a land of traders and these traders needed a means of communication beyond the spoken word. So they boldly took the little figures of the priests and simplified them for their own purposes. Thereafter they wrote their business letters in the new script which became known as the "popular language" and which we call by its Greek name, ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... do what he says until he does it. When he makes you a promise, just ask him to kindly put his name to it. I'm like a darkey—I've more confidence in a piece of paper with some writing on it than in the spoken word. Men mean well, and they'll promise a woman heaven or hell to get rid of her, but you can't trust them. ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... voice. He cross-fertilized the two sciences of acoustics and electricity. His study of "Visible Speech" had trained his mind so that he could mentally SEE the shape of a word as he spoke it. He knew what a spoken word was, and how it acted upon the air, or the ether, that carried its vibrations from the lips to the ear. He was a third-generation specialist in the nature of speech, and he knew that for the transmission of spoken words there must be "a pulsatory ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... later, as she came out from under the anesthetic, she realized how very wretched she felt. The nurse leaned over to catch her first spoken word. ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... never heard him speak a disloyal word of any of his colleagues. No man could have advocated Imperialism as he did without making political enemies, and many a vigorous attack was made on him by young Canadians; but I do not recall any spoken word or any printed sentence of his that dragged his advocacy of Imperialism into the realm of party politics or personal controversy. I know how true and generous he was to one of his friends who always found in him a congenial fellow-worker in the things of the spirit. I also ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... those fond days when every spoken word Was sweet, and all the fleeting things unspoken Yet sweeter, and the music half unheard Murmured through forests ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West
... the unscientific type, holding the other virtually in contempt. Their choice may be right or wrong, but that it is reversible seems unlikely. Such revolutions in public opinion are rare events. Democracy moreover inevitably worships and is swayed by the spoken word. As inevitably, the range and purposes of science daily more and more transcend the comprehension—even the educated comprehension—of the vulgar, who will of course elevate the nimble and versatile, speaking a familiar language, above ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... preach and who enjoy the influence and popularity that oratory always will have. These men, however, are outstanding and their success illustrates the continuing power of oratory, but it gives no argument for the effectiveness of preaching in general. As a person having an instinctive bias for the spoken word, I have slowly been driven to the opinion that a great multitude of people feel differently and are more sincerely and more easily influenced by other means of bringing truth home to the ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves |
