Quod Deterius Potiori Insidiari Soleat

Very beautifully, therefore, was it said that speech goes forth to meet the conceptions, and that it runs on endeavouring to overtake them, from its desire of giving information respecting them, for everything has the greatest affection for its own proper employment; and the proper employment of speech is to speak, to which employment therefore it hastens by a kind of natural kindred and propriety. And it rejoices and exults when, shedding its rays upon it as it were, it accurately sees and overtakes the sense of the matter exhibited; for then, seizing it in its embrace, it becomes its most excellent interpreter.

At all events, we repudiate those chatterers and interminable talkers, who, in the long passages of their conversations, do not properly keep to their conceptions, but merely connect long and empty and, to say the truth, lifeless sentences. Therefore the conversation of such men as these is indecorous, and is justly condemned to groan; as, on the other hand, it is inevitable that that conversation which proceeds from a proper consideration of the objects of its consideration must rejoice, since it comes in an adequate manner to the interpretation of the things which it saw and comprehended