Quotes about chatter (79 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“If you have time to chatter,
Read books.

If you have time to read,
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean.

If you have time to walk,
Sing songs and dance.

If you have time to dance,
Sit quietly, you happy, lucky idiot.”

Nanao Sakaki (1923–2008) Japanese poet

Books , Mountain , Singing , Time

“No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Loneliness

“Below me Rontu was running along the cliffs barking at the screaming gulls. Pelicans were chattering as they finished the blue water. But suddenly I thought of Tutok, and the island seemed very quiet.”

Scott O'Dell book Island of the Blue Dolphins

Source: Island of the Blue Dolphins

Water

“Cease negative mental chattering. — If you think a thing is impossible, you'll make it impossible. Pessimism blunts the tools you need to succeed.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 121

Thinking

“That which Heraclitus avoided, however, is still the same at that which we shun today: the noise and democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their latest news of the “Empire,” … their market business of “today”—for we philosophers need to be spared one thing above all: everything to do with “today.” We reverence what is still, cold, noble, distant, past, and in general everything in the face of which the soul does not have to defend itself and wrap itself up.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 3, Aphorism 8, W. Kaufmann, trans., in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (1992), p. 546
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Soul , Business , Distant , Past

“In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity … But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous … In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

"Women and Fiction"
Granite and Rainbow (1958)

Women , Men , Books , Art

“The harebrained chatter of irresponsible frivolity.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech, Guildhall, London (1878-11-09).
1870s

“What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?—
Most men eddy about
Here and there—eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl’d in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and, then they die—
Perish; and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell’d,
Foam’d for a moment, and gone.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

St. 6
Rugby Chapel (1867)

Love , Life , Men , Hate

“We know today that nothing will restore the pre-machine condition of reasonably universal employment save an artificial allocation of working hours involving the use of more men than formerly to perform a given task.... The primary function of society, in spite of all the sophistries spurred of selfishness, is to give men better conditions than they could get without it; and the basic need today is jobs for all—not for "property" for a few of the luck and the acquisitive.... In view of the urgent need for change, there is something almost obscene in the chatter of the selfish about various psychological evils allegedly inherent in a New Deal promising decent economic security and humane leisure for all instead of for a few.... What is worth answering is the kindred outcry about "regimentation", "collective slavery", "violation of Anglo-Saxon freedom", "destruction of the right of the individual to make his own way" and so on; with liberal references to Stalin, Hitler, Mustapha Kemal, and other extremist dictators who have sought to control men's personal, intellectual, and artistic lives, and traditional habits and folkways, as well as their economic fortunes. Naturally the Anglo-Saxon balks at any programme calculated to limit his freedom as a man and a thinker or to disturb his inherited perspectives and daily customs—and need we say that no plan ever proposed in an Anglo-Saxon country would conceivably seek to limit such freedom or disturb such perspectives and customs? Here we have a deliberate smoke-screen—conscious and malicious confusion of terms. A decent planned society would indeed vary to some extent the existing regulations (for there are such) governing commercial and economic life. Yet who save a self-confessed Philistine or Marxist (the plutocrat can cite "Das Kapital" for his purpose!) would claim that the details and conditions of our merely economic activities form more than a trivial fraction of our whole lives and personalities? That which is essential and distinctive about a man is not the routine of material struggle he follows in his office; but the civilised way he lives, outside his office, the life whose maintenance is the object of his struggle. So long as his office work gains him a decently abundant and undisputedly free life, it matters little what that work is—what the ownership of the enterprise, and what and how distributed its profits, if profits there be. We have seen that no system proposes to deny skill and diligence an adequate remuneration. What more may skill and diligence legitimately ask? Nor is any lessening in the pride of achievement contemplated. Man will thrill just as much at the overcoming of vast obstacles, and the construction of great works, whether his deeds be performed for service or for profit. As it is, the greatest human achievements have never been for profit. Would Keats or Newton or Lucretius or Einstein or Santayana flourish less under a rationally planned society? Any intimation that a man's life is wholly his industrial life, and that a planned economic order means a suppression of his personality, is really both a piece of crass ignorance and an insult to human nature. Incidentally, it is curious that no one has yet pointed to the drastically regulated economic life of the early Mass. Bay colony as something "American!"”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Unpublished (and probably unsent) letter to the Providence Journal (13 April 1934), quoted in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy, edited by J. T. Joshi, pp. 115-116
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life , Men , Way , Nature

“All true language
is incomprehensible,
Like the chatter
of a beggar’s teeth.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Ci-Gît.

“Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing — a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U. N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized."”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976) [Viking/Penguin, 1998, ISBN 0-141-18075-7], p. 21
General sources

Literature , Reality , Study

“Prince, give the prize for chatter
To Parisian women; whatever
May be said about Italians,
There is no tongue like one from Paris.”

Francois Villon book Le Testament

Prince, aux dames Parisiennes
De beau parler donnez le pris;
Quoy qu'on die d'Italiennes,
Il n'est bon bec que de Paris.
Source: Le Grand Testament (The Great Testament) (1461), Line 1539; "Ballade des Femmes de Paris (Ballade of the Women of Paris)".

Women

“Through such impressions one gathers oneself, wins oneself back from the exacting multiplicity, which speaks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and one slowly learns to recognize the very few Things in which something eternal endures that one can love and something solitary that one can gently take part in.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

About Rome.
Letter Five (29 October 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Love , Learning , Parting

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Adapted from a passage in Schools of Hellas http://www.archive.org/stream/schoolsofhellasa008878mbp#page/n105/mode/2up, the posthumously published dissertation of Kenneth John Freeman (1907). The original passage was a paraphrase of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times. See the Quote Investigator article http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehaving-children-in-ancient-times/.
see Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service, Edited by Suzy Platt, 1989, number 195 http://www.bartleby.com/73/195.html. Last line: "Evidently, the quotation is spurious."
See also this Google Answers discussion http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=398104 about the topic.
Somewhat similar sentiments are in ( lines 961–985 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0241:card%3D961) of Aristophanes' The Clouds, a comedic play known for its caricature of Socrates. However, the lines are delivered by the character "Right" or "Just Discourse", not Socrates.
Misattributed

Love , Children , Exercises , Parent

“Cease negative mental chattering.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

If you think a thing is impossible, you'll make it impossible. Pessimism blunts the tools you need to succeed.
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 121

“He wanted to shake her until every one of her chattering teeth hit the ground. "What the hell are you trying to say? Why did she choose me?"
Jodie eyed him warily. "Because she thinks you're stupid.”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips book Nobody's Baby But Mine

Source: Nobody's Baby But Mine

Stupidity , Hell , Thinking

“To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Variant: I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.
Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.”

Robert McKee (1941) American academic specialised in seminars for screenwriters

Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

Art , Music , Silence , Dance

“Silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter.”

Buster Keaton (1895–1966) American actor and filmmaker

God , Silence

“The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 23.
Context: To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The natural laziness of the mind tempts one to eschew authors who demand a continuous effort of intelligence. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
People tell me that they must read the papers so as to know what is going on. In the first place, they could hardly find a worse guide. Most of what is printed turns out to be false, sooner or later. Even when there is no deliberate deception, the account must, from the nature of the case, be presented without adequate reflection and must seem to possess an importance which time shows to be absurdly exaggerated; or vice versa. No event can be fairly judged without background and perspective.

Education

“when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

Source: The Wind in the Willows

World , Heart , Sea

“The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.”

Arthur Koestler book Darkness at Noon

Source: Darkness at Noon

“It’s really hard to do nothing totally. Even just sitting here, like this, our bodies are churning, our minds are chattering. There’s a whole commotion going on inside us.”

Jerry Spinelli book Stargirl

Source: Stargirl

“I will not be distracted by noise, chatter, or setbacks. Patience, commitment, grace, and purpose will guide me.”

Louise L. Hay (1926–2017) American writer

Patience

“Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars:
Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o’ the moon.”

Francis Thompson The Hound of Heaven

St. 2.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)

World , Star

“As for their healers and their worship of gold books of old lore, there had been tribal stories of this, too, all nonsense, as anything chattered by the ill-informed must be.”

Tanith Lee book Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

Book Two, Part II “The Wolf Hunt”, Chapter 3 (p. 185)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

Books

“Love is the foundation of all obedience. Without it, morality degenerates into mere casuistry. Love is the foundation of all knowledge. Without it religion degenerates into a chattering about Moses and doctrines and theories; a thing that will neither kill nor make alive, that never gave life to a single soul or blessing to a single heart, and never put strength into any hand in the conflict and strife of daily life.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 400.

Love , Life , Religion , Soul

“For all the chatter that Britain has moved beyond class, recent studies have found that it determines the life chances of British people more today than at any point since the Second World War… A child born into a rich family in Britain will almost certainly live and die rich, while a child born into a poor family will almost certainly live and die poor.”

Johann Hari (1979) British journalist

Britain - a caste society?, JohannHari.com, January 29, 2006, 2007-01-26 http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=789,

Life , War , People , World

“The language of the internet is English, and an overwhelming proportion of the global computer chatter also originates from America, influencing the content of global conversation.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński book The Grand Chessboard

Source: The Grand Chessboard (1997), Chapter 1, Hegemony Of A New Type, p. 25.

“Dark and deserted as it was, the night was full of small noises, song and chatter and rustling, telling of the busy little population who were up and about, plying their trades and vocations through the night till sunshine should fall on them at last and send them off to their well-earned repose. The water's own noises, too, were more apparent than by day, its gurglings and 'cloops' more unexpected and near at hand; and constantly they started at what seemed a sudden clear call from an actual articulate voice.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 7, "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn"

Business , Water , Night

“This is the essence of the problem. To Dan Rather and to a lot of other powerful members of the chattering class, that which is right of center is conservative. That which is left of center is middle of the road. No wonder they can't recognize their own bias.”

Bernard Goldberg (1945) American journalist

Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (2001)

Problem

“The sky was dark, the night was black, obscurity reigned, the gleam of the wolves eyes was the only light that came to sight, the howling of the jackal was the only sound to be heard, conspiracies were in the making while slanderers and the malicious were busily chattering”

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) Iranian academic and activist

Quote in: Ali Rahnema An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariati. (2000), p. 258
Rahnema commented that "Shariati did not believe he had any chance of returning to Ershad and evaluated his situation in a poetical and macabre fashion".

Light , Night

“Now I understand for Mr Downer and other members of the chattering classes in the Liberal Party: they might think what qualifies you to know about national security, is you sit in a minister's office typing press releases all of your lives, with the greatest risk to your personal safety being a papercut – Mr Downer might think that's appropriate; well I do not.”

Julia Gillard (1961) Australian politician and lawyer, 27th Prime Minister of Australia

Response to criticism by former Liberal Foreign Minister Alexander Downer
"Julia Gillard slams Downer over security" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW4NtYIu2XE, in ABC News, 30 July 2010

Understanding , Thinking , Personality

“Roger: This place called Common Grounds that used to be called the Covered Dish. We’ve been playing there over the last thirteen years so that feels the most home-ish. [some background chatter] Yeah the old room moved to where the Covered Dish used to be, the old room is a club that’s called 1982 that my friend owns. That’s a cool little club. That’s more where I go to hangout than Common Grounds. Common Grounds is kind of hectic and that kind of thing but yeah it’s the same owner as it was from the little place.”

Roger Manganelli (1973) American musician

Feeling , Home

“Later that evening, with exhaustion setting in and nothing left to do but wait for clearance to fly, Cathy and I took the aircrew to dinner; the members of our traveling staff stayed behind, chained to their phones and computers. We walked through the quiet waterfront to the lamp-lit, sandstone-block courtyard of the Mylos Taverna. As we filed to our corner table, the normally-effusive chatter of the Greek patrons dropped to a whisper. I scanned the nearby tables; faces everywhere were drawn with sadness. Yiannis, our usually-smiling waiter, approached silently and shook my hand as if at a funeral. "Everyone is so sorry, General," the man said.”

Tommy Franks (1945) United States Army general

Source: American Soldier (2004), p. 246

Sadness , Smile , Travel , Waiting

“Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you... remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God’s business... even your own life is not your business. It also is God’s business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought... unclench the fists of your spirit and take it easy... What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort... than being able from time to time to stop that chatter...”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Telling Secrets (1991)

Life , God , Business , Thinking

“I am delighted to be presenting again. It was always a question of finding the right show to do and Without Prejudice? certainly fits the sock. I think it will cause much chattering.”

Liza Tarbuck (1964) English actress and television and radio presenter

John Plunkett Tarbuck set for C4 return, MediaGuardian, Monday 11 November 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2002/nov/11/broadcasting.channel41

Question , Thinking

“But who looks for serious conduct at the public shows? A Cato never goes to the circus. Anything said there by the people as they celebrate should be deemed no injury. It is a place that protects excesses. Patient acceptance of their chatter is a proven glory of princes themselves.”
Mores autem graves in spectaculis quis requirat? ad circum nesciunt convenire Catones. quicquid illic a gaudenti populo dicitur, iniuria non putatur. locus est qui defendit excessum. quorum garrulitas si patienter accipitur, ipsos quoque principes ornare monstratur.

Cassiodorus Variae

Bk. 1, no. 27; p. 19.
Variae

People

“Don’t go chattering to the stars if you’re going to do it with your eyes closed.”

Samuel R. Delany book Nova

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 7 (p. 197)

Star

“We should embrace the disagreement that echoes in this chamber because this is the forum that the founders of our greatcountry envisioned. We should… no we are duty bound to enthusiastically avail ourselves it. This discourse is not idle chatter, but rather it is an adversarial system. It is a system that creates accountability in government. It creates a free market of ideas.”

Robert Agresta (1983)

Scribd:Robert Agresta Inauguration speech Quoted in Mayor & Council Meeting of January 2009 http://www.scribd.com/full/54569111?access_key=key-11gd71r31loly41co5n5

Idea

“I looked down on a quilt of clouds, bordered on the horizon by the blood-orange streaks of the setting sun. As the steady hum of the engine drowned out the chatter around me, I realized that I would probably be thinking about the implications of Watergate for the rest of my life. For the country, and for me it had been a significant point in time.”

Fred Thompson (1942–2015) American politician and actor

page 263
At That Point in Time, Impact of Watergate

Life , Thinking , Time , Sun

“Gilt-tooled on yard-square panels of green leather—imitation, of course—the zodiacal signs looked down from the walls of the executive lunch-room. The air was full of the chatter of voices and the clink of ice-cubes. Waiting to be attacked when the president of the company joined them (he had promised to show at one sharp) was a table laden with expensive food: hard-boiled eggs, shells intact so that it could be seen they were brown, free-range, rich in carotene; lettuces whose outer leaves had been rasped by slugs; apples and pears wearing their maggot-marks like dueling scars, in this case presumably genuine ones though it had been known for fruit growers to fake them with red-hot wires in areas where insects were no longer found; whole hams, very lean, proud of their immunity from antibiotics and copper sulphate; scrawny chickens; bread as coarse as sandstone, dark as mud and nubbled with wheat grains...”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

December “HOUSE TO HOUSE”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Food , Waiting

“Roof-brain chatter makes up the bulk of one's "mental life." This activity filters out the present moment, drowns the primary perceptions in sheer head noise, and grounds one in a stasis of imaginary chaos.”

Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926–2016) American writer

Source: Exploring the Crack In the Cosmic Egg (1974), p. 100-101

Life

“p>One translucent day I leave the city
to visit my home, the land of Champa.Here are stupas gaunt with yearning,
ancient temples ruined by time,
streams that creep alone through the dark
past peeling statues that moan of Champa.Here are dense and drooping forests
where long processions, lost souls of Champa,
march; and evening spills through thick,
fragrant leaves, mingling with the cries of moorhens.Here is the field where two great armies
were reduced to a horde of clamoring souls.
Champa blood still cascades in streams of hatred
to grinding oceans filled with Champa bones.Here too are placid images: hamlets at rest
in evening sun, Champa girls gliding homeward,
their light chatter floating
with the pink and saffron of their dresses.Here are magnificent sunbaked palaces,
temples that blaze in cerulean skies.
Here battleships dream on the glossy river, while the thunder
of sacred elephants shakes the walls.Here, in opaque light sinking through lapis lazuli,
the Champa king and his men are lost in a maze of flesh
as dancers weave, wreathe, entranced,
their bodies harmonizing with the flutes.All this I saw on my way home years ago
and still I am obsessed,
my mind stunned, sagged with sorrow
for the race of Champa.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"On the Way Home", in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, ed. Nguyễn Ngọc Bích (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 167; quoted in full in Buddhism & Zen in Vietnam by Thich Thien-an (Tuttle Publishing, 1992)

Men , Dreams , Way , Home

“Today we decide about metaphysics and about even more elevated things at philosophy conferences. For everything that is to be done these days we must first have a meeting, and here is how it works: people come together, constantly come together, and they all wait for one another to turn up so that the others will tell them how it is, and if it doesn’t get said, never mind, everyone has had their say. It may very well be that all the talkers who are having their say have understood little of the matter in question, but still we believe that if we accumulate all that misunderstanding something like understanding will leap forth at the end of the day. Thus there are people today who travel from one meeting to the next and who are sustained by the confidence that something is really happening, that they’ve actually done something; whereas, at bottom, they’ve merely ducked out of work, seeking in chatter a place to build a nest for their helplessness—a helplessness, it is true, that they will never understand.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

Gesamtausgabe, 20:376, as translated by David Farrell Krell in Portraits of American Continental Philosophers (1999), p. 101

People , Travel , Confidence , Understanding

“Meanwhile Medea, though she was singing and dancing with her maids, could think of one thing only. There was no melody, however gay, that did not quickly cease to please. Time and again she faltered and came to a halt. To keep her eyes fixed on her choir was more than she could do. She was for ever turning them aside to search the distant paths, and more than once she well-nigh fainted when she mistook the noise of the wind for the footfall of a passer-by. But it was not so very long before the sight of Jason rewarded her impatient watch. Like Sirius rising from Ocean, brilliant and beautiful but full of menace for the flocks, he sprang into view, splendid to look at but fraught with trouble for the lovesick girl. Her heart stood still, a mist descended on her eyes, and a warm flush spread across her cheeks. She could neither move towards him nor retreat; her feet were rooted to the ground. And now her servants disappeared, and the pair of them stood face to face without a word or sound, like oaks or tall pines that stand in the mountains side by side in silence when the air is still, but when the wind has stirred them chatter without end. So these two, stirred by the breath of Love, were soon to pour out all their tale.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book III. Jason and Medea, Lines 948–972

Love , Beauty , Search , Girl

“Of science and logic he chatters,
As fine and as fast as he can;
Though I am no judge of such matters,
I’m sure he’s a talented man.”

Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–1839) British politician, poet

The talented Man.

Science

“I serve at the pleasure of @POTUS. His message is my message. His goals are my goals. Uninformed chatter doesn't matter.”

Kellyanne Conway (1967) American strategist and pollster

Twitter account @KellyannePolls https://twitter.com/KellyannePolls/status/831566360153042944 (February 14, 2017)

Pleasure

“If you’re very very rich, you can buy your Senate seat by spending as much of your money as you want. Meanwhile, your poor plebian opponent is running around groveling for the small contributions allowed by law. Hence the Corzines and the Kohls, who parachute into Congress seemingly out of nowhere. Having given this leg up to the rich, we should resist packing our legislatures with yet more privileged parachutists, the well-born. True, the Brits did it that way for centuries, but with characteristic honesty. They established a house of Parliament exclusively for high-born twits and ensconced them there for life. There they chatter away in supreme irrelevance deep into their dotage. Problem is that the U. S. Senate retains House of Commons powers even as it develops a House of Lords membership.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Column, December 19, 2008, "The U.S. House of Lords?" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer121908.php3 at jewishworldreview.com.
2000s, 2008

Life , Money , Law , Way

“Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to wife Louie (Louisa Wanda Strentzel) (July 1888); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 15: Winning a Competence
1880s

Travel , Silence , Heart

“On Melbourne summer mornings the green trams go rolling in stately progress down tunnels thick with leaves: the bright air carries along the avenue their patient chime, the chattering of their wheels”

Helen Garner book Cosmo Cosmolino

Page 5.
Cosmo Cosmolino (1992)

Summer

“She had called Martin a 'lie-hunter,' a 'truth-seeker.' They decided now that most people who call themselves 'truth-seekers'—persons who scurry about chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible separable thing, like houses or salt or bread—did not so much desire to find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the 'secret of life' in laboratories which did not seem to be provided with Bunsen flames or reagents; or they went, at great expense and much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all sort of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in eating rice and gazing on one's navel. To these high matters Martin responded, 'Rot!' He insisted that there is no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not a colored bird to be chased among the rocks and captured by its tail, but a skeptical attitude toward life. He insisted that no one could expect more than, by stubbornness or luck, to have the kind of work he enjoyed and an ability to become better acquainted with the facts of that work than the average job-holder.”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 25

Life , People , Truth , Lie

“Selling eighths to an eighth of the population, giving them a proper education
Teeth chatter when I walk past hearts of glass… shatter, I shape planets out of dark matter”

Jehst (1979) British rapper

Citizen Smif
The Return of the Drifter EP (2002), Falling Down LP (2003)

Education , Past , Heart

“It is understandable then that tragic heroes, unlike the baroque characters who had preceded them, could never be mad, and that inversely madness could never take on the tragic value we have known since Nietzsche and Artaud. In the classical epoch, tragic characters and the mad face each other without any possible dialogue or common language, for the one can only pronounce the decisive language of being, where the truth of light and the depths of night meet in a flash, and the other repeats endlessly an indifferent murmur where the empty chatter of the day is cancelled out by the deceptive lies of the shadows.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
History of Madness (1961)

Truth , Understanding , Decision , Light

“Now, if there is anyone dissatisfied with the fact, that there is a whole race of human beings, with the rights of human beings, created with a skin not colored like our own, let him go mouth the heavens, and mutter his blasphemies in the ear of the God that made us all. Tell him that he had no business to make human beings with a black skin. I repeat, I feel no responsibility for this fact. But, inasmuch as it has pleased God to make them human beings, I am bound to regard them as such. Instead of chattering your gibberish in my ear bout negro equality, go look the son of God in the face and reproach him for favoring negro equality because he poured out his blood for the most abject and despised of the human family. Go settle this matter with the God who created and the Christ who redeemed.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838–64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA177 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 177
1850s, The Fanaticism of the Democratic Party (February 1859)

God , Family , Color , Feeling

“There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

Vol. 1, pt. 1.
Panegyric (1989)

World , Nature

“One of the most serious obstacles to happiness is the awkwardness of modern man, with his mind full of doctrines and abstract formulas, when he attempts to re-establish contact with real emotions. Animals and unsophisticated people achieve happiness more naturally, because their desires are simpler and truer. Civilized man, a parrot enslaved by his chattering, ceaselessly inoculates himself with loves and hatreds which he does not actually fee.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Happiness

Love , People , Nature , Animals

“Every time I know we have to go out on tour, there’s about three or four weeks where I’m terrified—where I start thinking: That’s not me. I’m not Freddie Mercury. Then I go out onstage and it’s like diving into the cold Puget Sound after spending five weeks in Hawaii—there’s a shock to the system, but the fear goes away. You get used to it, which is pretty cool, because if I stopped performing, I could just disappear and end up being some weird chattering man that walks the streets in rags, staring only at the pavement. At first you rationalize that going to a club where people recognize you is a bad idea; then going to a neighborhood bar becomes a bad idea, too. Going to the grocery store becomes a bad idea. Answering the phone becomes a bad idea. Then every time the dog barks, you think the National Guard is on your roof ready to drill holes in the shingles and shoot at you. So I have to deal with the outside world on sort of a maintenance level—go out to a bar every so often and just be around people.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

On being anti-social

People , World , Fear , Dogs

“Tell me of this Wizard Howl of yours."
Sophie's teeth chattered, but she said proudly, "He's the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he'd only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he's sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly and you can't pin him down to anything."
"Indeed?" asked Abdullah. "Strange that you should speak so proudly such a list of vices, most loving of ladies."
"What do you mean — vices?”

Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011) English children's fantasy writer

Sophie asked angrily. "I was just describing Howl."
Source: Castle Series, Castle in the Air (1990), p. 214.

Love , Time , Selfishness

“Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea! Do not think that I am jesting or speaking figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to the Higher, and (because the vast majority belongs under this head) almost the whole world of men, as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. What is it, then, that is called a "fixed idea"? An idea that has subjected the man to itself. When you recognize, with regard to such a fixed idea, that it is a folly, you shut its slave up in an asylum. And is the truth of the faith, say, which we are not to doubt; the majesty of (e. g.) the people, which we are not to strike at (he who does is guilty of — lese-majesty); virtue, against which the censor is not to let a word pass, that morality may be kept pure; — are these not "fixed ideas"? Is not all the stupid chatter of (e. g.) most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, Christianity, etc., and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

New York 1907, p. 54, 55
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

Men , God , People , Truth

“The Autumn wood the aster knows,
The empty nest, the wind that grieves,
The sunlight breaking thro' the shade,
The squirrel chattering overhead,
The timid rabbits lighter tread
Among the rustling leaves.”

Dora Read Goodale (1866–1953) U.S. poet

Asters, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 45.

Autumn

“Out came Ms. Hilton in a Juicy track suit, chattering away like a gibbon on her jewel-encrusted cell phone. It was like magic, if magic were like a extra-strength laxative.”

April Winchell (1960) American voice actor and writer

On Sunday December 5, 2004 at 7:34 pm from aprilwinchell.com http://www.aprilwinchell.com/12/2004/.

“The huge church is burrowed into ancient mountains. By elevator you rise up through the mountain to the foot of a giant cross that soars nearly 500 feet into an intense blue sky, its arms spreading 300 feet. The four Evangelists who crouched at the base are 28 feet high, carved out of stone. All Spain comes to the Valley of the Fallen for its moment of meditation. It is a wondrous work, but it never lets you forget that it marks one of man's most ghastly works—war. But war—like all pain—is soon forgotten. New generations are born. And inMadrid you see families together, voluble, chattering, touching each other, husbands, wives, children. They smile at each other, and at you. And you smile back. For that is the true Madrid. It embraces you. It loves you. Soon, you love it back.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From "Madrid: The City Simpatico," https://books.google.com/books?id=_DAcznaeZSIC&pg=PA76&dq=%22The+huge+church+is+burrowed%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAGoVChMI4aylrdTGxwIVRc2ACh0cbAXy#v=onepage&q=%22The%20huge%20church%20is%20burrowed%22&f=false in Boys' Life (February 1970), p. 76
Other Topics

Love , Pain , War , Children

“I came to the riverbank. The sand underfoot crunches and sounds like my grandmother sighing. She is fond of chattering endlessly, although no-one understands her. If you ask, Grandmother, what did you say? She will look up absentmindedly and, after a while, say, oh, you’re back from school? Are you hungry? There are sweet potatoes in the bamboo steamer. When she chatters it is best not to interrupt; she is talking about when she was a young woman. But if you eavesdrop from behind her chair, she seems to be saying. It’s hidden, it’s hidden, everything is hidden, everything… All these memories are making noises in the sand under your feet.”

Gao Xingjian (1940) Chinese novelist and playwright

Source: Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (2005), p. 100

School , Understanding , Memory

“The advantage it had gained it has steadily maintained. 'This is our matter, you know', it said. 'Just please let us alone'. It was let alone. Texas was ceded for Florida, completing the sea-line of slavery; and when slavery was ready Texas was taken back again, as when, afterwards, slavery had secured its share of the bargain, the Missouri Compromise was broken. In due order came the Mexican war and its consequences, the Fugitive-slave Bill and the loud chatter about saving the Union, so incessant that every thoughtful man asked himself. Is the casket more than the gem — the body than the soul — the Union than liberty? Then came the bloody tragedy of Kansas, with its justification by the President of the United States and by the Chief Justice; and I think no one will deny that Mr. Stephens is correct in calmly congratulating himself that slavery has carried all the important objects for which it has striven.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

War , Justice , Soul , Thinking

“Primitive animals will sometimes keep chattering or twitching their muscles even after their heads have been cut off. And that's probably the best analogy today to the president's continuing enunciation of his policies.”

Josh Marshall Talking Points Memo

Talking Points Memo (2007-09-14)

Animals

“I cannot hold with those who wish to put down the insignificant chatter of the world.”

Anthony Trollope Framley Parsonage

Source: Framley Parsonage (1861), Ch. 10

World

“Journalism is a character defect. I think most non-journalists would agree with this. It is life lived at a safe remove: standing off to one side of the parade as it passes, noting its flaws, offering glib and unworkable suggestions for its improvement. Every journalist must know that this is not, really, how a serious-minded person would choose to spend his days. Serious-minded people do things; a journalist chatters about the things serious-minded people do, and so, not coincidentally, avoids having to do them himself. A significant body of research indicates that non-journalists find us insufferable, perhaps for this reason.”

Andrew Ferguson (1956) American journalist

"Scotty: All the news that's fit to schmooze" http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=2248&R=ECC0849, The Weekly Standard, 24 February 2003

Life , People , Thinking , Personality

“It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content … it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.”

René Daumal book A Night of Serious Drinking

Foreword
A Night of Serious Drinking (1938)

“…why should our self-appointed instructors assume that because we do not chatter about a thing, we have never heard of it?”

Agnes Repplier (1855–1950) American essayist

in "The Repeal of Reticence" (March 1914)

“These experiences are not 'religious' in the ordinary sense. They are natural, and can be studied naturally. They are not 'ineffable' in the sense the sense of incommunicable by language. Maslow also came to believe that they are far commoner than one might expect, that many people tend to suppress them, to ignore them, and certain people seem actually afraid of them, as if they were somehow feminine, illogical, dangerous. 'One sees such attitudes more often in engineers, in mathematicians, in analytic philosophers, in book keepers and accountants, and generally in obsessional people'. The peak experience tends to be a kind of bubbling-over of delight, a moment of pure happiness. 'For instance, a young mother scurrying around her kitchen and getting breakfast for her husband and young children. The sun was streaming in, the children clean and nicely dressed, were chattering as they ate. The husband was casually playing with the children: but as she looked at them she was suddenly so overwhelmed with their beauty and her great love for them, and her feeling of good fortune, that she went into a peak experience…”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: New Pathways In Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972), p. 17

Love , Children , People , Books

“Our lives are so full of activity and "chatter" it’s difficult to find quiet time… Those are the moments that are the most creative for me. The location is less important than the choice to turn other things off. Because I find that the quietest times of my life speak the loudest.”

Regina E. Dugan (1963) American businesswoman, inventor, and technology developer

As quoted in "The CNN 10 : Thinkers" (2013)

Life , Time

“You know, in the case of most of us, the mind is noisy, everlastingly chattering to itself , soliloquizing or chattering about something, or trying to talk to itself, to convince itself of something; it is always moving, noisy.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Varanasi 2nd Public Talk (22 November 1964)
1960s
Context: You know, in the case of most of us, the mind is noisy, everlastingly chattering to itself, soliloquizing or chattering about something, or trying to talk to itself, to convince itself of something; it is always moving, noisy. And from that noise, we act. Any action born of noise produces more noise, more confusion. But if you have observed and learnt what it means to communicate, the difficulty of communication, the non-verbalization of the mind — that is, that communicates and receives communication—, then, as life is a movement, you will, in your action, move on naturally, freely, easily, without any effort, to that state of communion. And in that state of communion, if you enquire more deeply, you will find that you are not only in communion with nature, with the world, with everything about you, but also in communion with yourself.

“One might think you knew all about witches, to hear you chatter. But your words prove you to be very ignorant of the subject. You may find good people and bad people in the world; and so, I suppose, you may find good witches and bad witches.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

"The Witchcraft of Mary-Marie", in Baum's American Fairy Tales (1908)
Short stories
Context: "But what can I do?" cried she, spreading out her arms helplessly. "I can not hew down trees, as my father used; and in all this end of the king's domain there is nothing else to be done. For there are so many shepherds that no more are needed, and so many tillers of the soil that no more can find employment. Ah, I have tried; hut no one wants a weak girl like me."
"Why don't you become a witch?" asked the man.
"Me!" gasped Mary-Marie, amazed. "A witch!"
"Why not?” he inquired, as if surprised.
"Well," said the girl, laughing. "I'm not old enough. Witches, you know, are withered dried-up old hags."
"Oh, not at all!" returned the stranger.
"And they sell their souls to Satan, in return for a knowledge of witchcraft," continued Mary-Marie more seriously.
"Stuff and nonsense!" cried the stranger angrily.
“And all the enjoyment they get in life is riding broomsticks through the air on dark nights," declared the girl.
"Well, well, well!" said the old man in an astonished tone. "One might think you knew all about witches, to hear you chatter. But your words prove you to be very ignorant of the subject. You may find good people and bad people in the world; and so, I suppose, you may find good witches and bad witches. But I must confess most of the witches I have known were very respectable, indeed, and famous for their kind actions."
"Oh. I'd like to be that kind of witch!" said Mary-Marie, clasping her hands earnestly.

People , World , Thinking

“I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies—in great towns and great crowds. It is a plant that takes times and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash," as we elegantly call it—an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.”

Henry James book The Awkward Age

Said by Vanderbank in Book I, ch. II.
The Awkward Age (1899)

Time , Friendship

“[T]he government of the world is carried on by Sovereigns and statesmen, and not by anonymous paragraph writers, or by the harebrained chatter of irresponsible frivolity.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Speech in the Guildhall, London (10 November 1878), quoted in The Times (11 November 1878), p. 10

World

“But how is it you know all this about how large the ocean is? I thought you girls were limited to pretty chatter and the economics of housekeeping. I didn’t know you learned geography.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

“We don’t,” she said, somewhat shamefaced. “But we learned to read, and once one can read, one can learn anything.”
Source: Singer from the Sea (1999), Chapter 17, “Merdune Lagoon” (p. 272)

Girl , Learning

“And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we're all sweating it - when we're worried that the bill won't pass, and it seems like all is lost - Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward... with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

Patience , Courage , Wisdom , Love

“Focus on the work because, personally, that brings me through the toughest day — that I’m focusing on the work at hand instead of [all] of these things that are bombarding me. The chatter in your mind is strong. So, you need to be stronger.”

Tzi Ma (1962) Hong Kong American actor

As quoted in "How ‘Mulan’s’ Tzi Ma Became Hollywood’s Go-To Asian Dad (Watch)" in Variety (4 September 2020) https://variety.com/2020/film/news/tzi-ma-mulan-hollywood-career-1234758692/

Strong , Personality