Letters Quotes - Page 11

• Let your letter be written as accurately as you are able,--I mean with regard to language, grammar, and stops; for as to the matter of it the less trouble you give yourself the better it will be. Letters should be easy and natural, and convey to the persons to whom we send them just what we should say to the persons if we were with them.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Mean, Giving, Matter

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• Ugliness is a letter of credit for some special purposes.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Special, Purpose, Credit

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• When griefs are genuine, I find, there is nothing more vacuous, more burdensome, or even more impertinent, than letters of consolation.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Sympathy, Grief, Vacuous

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• Deafness produces bizarre effects, reversing the natural order of things; the interchange of letters is the conversation of the deaf, and the only link with society. I would be in despair, for instance, over seeing you speak, but, instead, I am only too happy to hear you write.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Writing, Order, Despair

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• Fine manners are like personal beauty,--a letter of credit everywhere.

  C. A. Bartol

  Credit, Manners, Fine

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• No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

  P. D. James

  Spontaneous, Individual, Form

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• A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

  P. D. James

  Prejudice, May, Moments

  P. D. James (2007). “Time to Be in Earnest”, p.85, Vintage

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• Petty vexations may at times be petty, but still they are vexations. The smallest and most inconsiderable annoyances are the most piercing. As small letters weary the eye most, so the smallest affairs disturb us most.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Eye, Piercings, May

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• Had I not gone through the ordeal, in more than one country, of landing a job, I would he tempted to lose patience over the number of letters pouring in from fellows who want me or someone else to hand them a job on a silver platter with a guarantee that they will receive the wonderful promotion their talents warrant.... But a tragic number of young men and even older men have a notion that it is not up to them to prosecute the bettering process. They look to someone else to perform the trick for them.

  B. C. Forbes

  Country, Jobs, Men

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• The most famous self-made man in the world today is our own Edison. Talk with Mr. Edison and he will tell you he owes much if not most of his success to omnivorous reading. Forbes is one of his favorite publications. How closely he reads it can be gathered from a letter just received from him in which he asks the editor to forward a long analytical letter to the writer of a series of articles which contained two figures Mr. Edison questions, and he wants to know exactly on what authority or investigation they were based. Both letters were the product of Mr. Edison and were signed by him.

  B. C. Forbes

  Reading, Science, Men

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• Which class is happiest, the rich, the middle class or the poor? A very successful executive of a large organization touches upon this vital subject in a long letter to all his salesmen. He uses as his text a passage from Robinson Crusoe which included this: ""My Father bid me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and were not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind.

  B. C. Forbes

  Father, Successful, Class

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• Make the decision that you'll no longer use excuses to keep you from what you know is in your best interest. Today, act on something you've always avoided and explained away with a convenient excuse. Make a phone call you've been putting off, write a letter to a friend, put on a pair of walking shoes and go for a stroll, clean out your closet—do something you've been justifying not doing with excuses.

  Wayne Dyer

  Friends, Writing, Phones

  FaceBook post by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer from Jul 17, 2012

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• How do we know, then, when a code's been cracked?when we are right?when do we know if we have even received a message? Why, naturally, when, upon one set of substitutions, sense emerges like the outline under a rubbing; when a single tentative construal leads to several; when all the sullen letters of the code cry TEAM! after YEA! has been, by several hands, uncovered.

  William H. Gass

  Team, Reading, Hands

  William H. Gass (2012). “World Within The Word”, p.264, Knopf

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• Nothing has a letter effect upon children than praise.

  Philip Sidney

  Children, Praise, Effects

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• It is a strange thing to read a letter after the writer is dead - a bitter-sweet thing, in which pain and comfort are strangely mingled.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Sweet, Pain, Comfort

  Lucy Maud Montgomery (2016). “L. M. MONTGOMERY – Ultimate Collection: 20 Novels & 170+ Short Stories, Poetry, Letters and Autobiography (Including The Complete Anne of Green Gables Series & Emily Starr Trilogy): Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, The Blue Castle, Rilla of Ingleside, Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, The Golden Road, Mistress Pat, Chronicles of Avonlea, Kilmeny of the Orchard and many more”, p.1706, e-artnow

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• The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however, well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does - what feeling it spares - what horror it conceals.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Practice, Feelings, Doe

  Emily Bronte, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë (1851). “Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey: In Two Volumes”, p.16

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• In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Poetry, Becoming, Spirit

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• If the essence of cynicism consists in preferring nature to art, virtue to beauty and science; in not bothering about the letter of things -- to which the Stoic strictly adheres -- but in looking up to the spirit of things; in absolute contempt of all economic values and political splendor, and in courageous defence of the rights of independent freedom; then Christianity would be nothing but universal cynicism.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Art, Independent, Rights

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• I know of no sorrow greater than that occasioned by a delay of the post.

  Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sevigne

  Sorrow, Delay, Posts

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• Nor eye in a letter, nor hand in a purse, nor ear in the secret of another.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Eye, Hands, Temptation

  Benjamin Franklin (1987). “Poor Richard's Almanack: Being the Choicest Morsels of Wisdom, Written During the Years of the Almanack's Publication”, p.14, Peter Pauper Press, Inc.

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• A letter depends on how you read it, a melody on how you sing it.

  I. L. Peretz

  Melody, Depends

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• I do not think that life has a suspense more sickening than that of expecting a letter which does not come.

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon

  Thinking, Doe, Suspense

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1857). “The Complete Works of L. E. Landon ...”

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• Our first love-letter ... There is so much to be said, and which no words seems exactly to say - the dread of saying too much is so nicely balanced by the fear of saying too little. Hope borders on presumption, and fear on reproach.

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon

  First Love, Littles, Too Much

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1831). “Romance and Reality”, p.232

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• I prefer to make no new declarations [on southern policy beyond what was in the Letter of Acceptance]. But you may say, if you deem it advisable, that you know that I will stand by the friendly and encouraging words of that Letter, and by all that they imply. You cannot express that too strongly.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Acceptance, Encouraging Words, Southern

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• [T]his free and easy old-bachelor sort of life is quite full of fun and jollity. Pease and myself room together; and everything like order and neatness is banished from our presence as a nuisance--old letters and old boots and shoes, duds clean and duds dirty, books and newspapers, tooth-brushes, shoe-brushes, and clothes-brushes, all heaped together on chairs, settees, etc., in dusty and "most admired confusion." Now, what is there imaginable in clean, tidy private life equal to this?

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Fun, Book, Dirty

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