Don't speak unless you can improve on the silence.
Spanish Proverb
You can speak well if your tongue can deliver the message of your heart.
John Ford
To speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.
Ben Jonson
A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie.
Desiderius Erasmus
Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
D. H. Lawrence
Christ Himself has said: They are no longer two, but they are one flesh (Matt. 19:6). Is it strange then, if they are one flesh, that they should have one tongue and should say the same words, since they are one flesh, Head and body? Let us therefore hear them as one. But let us listen to the Head speaking as Head, and to the body speaking as the body. We do not separate the two realities, but two different dignities; for the Head saves, and the body is saved.
St. Augustine of Hippo
Time flies and draws us with it. The moment in which I am speaking is already far from me.
Nicolas Boileau-Despraux
Do not speak harshly to any one; those who are spoken to will answer thee in the same way. Angry speech is painful: blows for blows will touch thee.
Buddha
Peter the Hermit, Calvin, and Robespierre, each at an interval of three hundred years and all three from the same region, were, politically speaking, the Archimedean screws of their age, at each epoch a Thought which found its fulcrum in the self-interest of mankind.
Honor de Balzac