And the purpose of small talk is not to be controversial, clever or even interesting. It's simply to fill the silent void with a small gesture of common humanity. It's a spoken smile, a verbal handshake.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.

The Gunnar Challenge offers new workouts every day, a meal plan and daily 'verbal vitamins,' which are a motivational video or workout tip. The thing that really makes the program work is the forum, where Challengers can communicate with each other and with me.

I inherited Mom's verbal skills, and participated in forensics and essay contests in elementary school - and won every essay contest I ever entered.

I have experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from men, but I have also experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from women, usually when I failed to respond to their advances.

Mr. Bean is at his best when he is not using words, but I am equally at home in both verbal and nonverbal expression.

If God continues to give me health and a sane mind and verbal ability, I want to teach.

My desire to curtail undue freedom of speech extends only to such public areas as restaurants, airports, streets, hotel lobbies, parks, and department stores. Verbal exchanges between consenting adults in private are as of little interest to me as they probably are to them.

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

On the one hand we publicly pronounce the equality of all peoples; on the other hand, in our immigration laws, we embrace in practice these very theories we abhor and verbally condemn.

To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.

I had some wonderful dreaming meetings. I can't tell you specifically what they've been in the recent months. In the past they've been verbal kinds of messages that he needed to give me. Now they're more dreams of his presence.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

Women were very, very good at 'Pong'. It was part of the dating scene. The number of people who told me they met their wife or husband playing 'Pong' was huge. They were shoulder to shoulder, talking and playing. It was body contact and verbal contact.

I would love to create a piece of theater that is devised by a company of actors and creators that I'd put together, and I'd love for it to be nonverbal so it's something that someone with any communication ability can enjoy.

One of the most surprising forms of nonverbal communication is the way we automatically adjust the amount of time we spend looking into another's eyes as a function of our relative social position.

Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them.

There must be a reason why photographers are not very good at verbal communication. I think we get lazy.

Nonverbal communication forms a social language that is in many ways richer and more fundamental than our words.

Mental communication without verbalization... all space is made up of waves and we are constantly sending and receiving messages from our brain.

I think a guitar solo is how my emotion is most freely released, because verbal articulation isn't my strongest communication strength. My wife thinks that I should do interviews by listening to the questions and playing the answer on guitar.

I come from a part of Nigeria where a lot of value is placed on implicit communication. The 'well brought up' child is the one who can pick up nonverbal cues from adults and interpret them correctly.