"If the word is not dead when..." - Quote by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.
More by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
More on Communication
“I do not find it easy to talk to people I don't know.”
“I cannot find a faithful message-bearer," he wrote to his friend, the scholar Atticus. "How few are they who are able to carry a rather weighty letter without lightening it by reading.”
“When he who hears does not know what he who speaks means, and when he who speaks does not know what he himself means, that is philosophy.”
More on Misunderstanding
“It is also the fate of leadership to be misunderstood. For historians, academics, writers and journalists to reflect great lives according to their own subjective canon.”
“I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't.”
“The creative industries tend to dismiss technology as just something to buy and not understand how hard it is and how creative it can be as well.”