Inspirational Quotes on Gossip

“We have one crystal clear reason apart from the blessed happiness of this way of life. It is this: prayer is the core of our day. Take prayer out, and the day would collapse, would be pithless, a straw blown in the wind. But how can you pray--really pray, I mean--with one against who you have a grudge or whom you have been discussing critically with another? Try it. You will find it cannot be done.”

“One of the most difficult defilements of the spirit to deal with is the critical spirit. A critical spirit has its root in pride. Because of the 'plank' of pride in our own eye we are not capable of dealing with the 'speck' of need in someone else. We are often like the Pharisee who, completely unconscious of his own need prayed "God, I thank you that I am not like other men" (Luke 18:11). We are quick to see - and to speak of - the faults of others, but slow to see our own needs. How sweetly we relish the opportunity to speak critically of someone else - even when we are unsure of the facts. We forge that "a man who stirs up dissension among brothers" by criticizing one to another is one of the "six thing which the Lord hates" (Proverbs 6:16-19)”

“Curses are like chickens, they always come home to roost.”

“Gossip is passing on information when you are neither part of the problem nor part of the solution.”

“For acting thus you will remain innocent among the hissings of the serpents, and like a sweet strawberry you will receive no venom from the contact of venomous tongues.”

“Tale-bearing emits a threefold poison; for it injures the teller, the hearer, and the person concerning whom the tale is told.”

“I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.”

“I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.”

“You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.”

“Learn to hold thy tongue; five words cost Zacharias forty weeks of silence.”

“Some people will believe anything if it's whispered to them.”

“It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”

“It is a sign of a perverse and treacherous disposition to wound the good name of another, when he has no opportunity of defending himself.”

“If there is any person to whom you feel dislike, that is the person of whom you ought never to speak.”

“There is nothing that so much gratifies an ill tongue as when it finds an angry heart.”

“Knitting gives women something to think about while they are talking.”

“He made a pit and digged it. He was cunning in his plans and industrious in his labors. He stooped to the dirty work of digging. He did not fear to soil his own hands. He was willing to work in a ditch if others might fall therein. What mean things men will do to wreak revenge on the godly. They hunt for good men as if they were brute beasts - they that will not give them the fair chase afforded to the hare or the fox, but must secretly entrap them because they can neither run them down nor shoot them down. Our enemies will not meet us to the face for they fear us as much as they pretend to despise us. But let us look on to the end of the scene. The verse says he has fallen into the ditch that he has made. Ah, there he is. Let us laugh at his disappointment. Lo, he is himself the beast. He has hunted his own soul. The chase has brought him a goodly victim. So should it ever be.”

“If there were no gratified hearers of ill reports, there would be an end of the trade of spreading them.”

“Slander is worse than cannibalism.”

“Calumny would soon starve and die of itself if nobody took it in and gave it a lodging.”