Grenville Kleiser Biography Quotes 6 Report mistakes

Overview
Grenville Kleiser (1868, 1935) was a Canadian-born author, editor, and teacher of public speaking who built a durable reputation in North America for practical guides on eloquence, vocabulary, and self-culture. Working for many years in the United States, he addressed the needs of ministers, teachers, businesspeople, and students seeking clear, confident expression. His books, handbooks, and anthologies were designed to help readers improve diction, develop poise, and cultivate habits of daily reading and recitation. By combining a moral emphasis on character with disciplined training in language, he became a recognizable voice in early twentieth-century self-improvement literature.

Early Life and Formation
Kleiser was born in Toronto, Ontario, and educated himself broadly through reading and practice in rhetoric and elocution. He gravitated early toward the study of notable orations and the disciplined development of voice, pronunciation, and vocabulary. Drawn by the professional possibilities of the publishing and educational worlds, he settled in the United States as a young man, aligning his work with growing public interest in oratory, debate, and practical communication. His early discipline, daily reading, memorization, and spoken delivery, shaped the pedagogical methods he would later codify for thousands of readers.

Teacher of Public Speaking
Kleiser's teaching career crystallized around instruction in public speaking for aspiring professionals. He served as an instructor in public speaking at Yale Divinity School, where he worked with seminarians preparing for the pulpit and for pastoral leadership. This role brought him into contact with clergy, professors, and students who needed concrete techniques rather than abstract theory. He emphasized careful enunciation, cultivated vocabulary, purposeful gesture, and the ethical responsibilities of speech. His classroom practice, assigning daily vocal drills, reading aloud from exemplary prose and poetry, and analyzing notable sermons and speeches, fed directly into his later books. The colleagues and students he encountered in New Haven reinforced his conviction that eloquence was both an art and a discipline open to systematic training.

Editor and Collaborator with Publishers
Kleiser's editorial profile expanded through a close association with the New York house of Funk & Wagnalls, led by Isaac K. Funk and his partner Adam W. Wagnalls. With them he developed, introduced, and edited collections designed to place exemplary oratory within easy reach of the general reader. The multi-volume set The World's Great Sermons, for which Kleiser served as editor and provided introductions, gathered classic homiletic works by figures such as Charles H. Spurgeon, Henry Ward Beecher, Phillips Brooks, and John Henry Newman. By organizing, framing, and contextualizing these sermons, he created a portable library for students of preaching and rhetoric. His collaboration with seasoned editors and printers at Funk & Wagnalls ensured a wide circulation in libraries, churches, schools, and home study groups.

Author of Practical Handbooks
Kleiser became widely known for pragmatic books that broke the art of expression into learnable skills. Titles such as Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases, Phrases for Public Speakers, Talks on Talking, Inspiration and Ideals, and How to Build Mental Power distilled his classroom methods into daily exercises. Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases, in particular, offered readers an organized treasury of expressions and similes to sharpen diction and expand verbal resources. He encouraged readers to copy, rehearse, and adapt strong constructions from literature until precision and vigor became habitual. In complementary volumes he presented daily readings, inspirational maxims, and progressive drills that synchronized mental discipline with vocal practice. His handbooks balanced encouragement with rigor, promising that sustained effort, ten to fifteen minutes a day of deliberate practice, could noticeably elevate one's speaking and writing.

Methods and Philosophy
Kleiser's approach blended classical ideals with modern practicality. He recommended daily study of exemplary prose and poetry, memorization of brief passages, methodical enrichment of vocabulary, and frequent oral delivery before small audiences. He counseled readers to cultivate sincerity, moral clarity, and respect for listeners, arguing that effective speech required integrity as much as technique. He taught that confidence arose from preparation: annotated outlines, careful transitions, economy of words, and a flexible command of idiom. His anthologies supplied models; his exercises supplied drills; his inspirational selections supplied the resolve to persist. To him, language was both instrument and inheritance, something to be improved through craft and honored through use.

Circles of Influence and Contemporary Context
Kleiser worked alongside editors, teachers, and clergy who shared a belief in education through accessible books. His work with Isaac K. Funk and Adam W. Wagnalls aided distribution to a national readership, while his Yale Divinity School connections kept him in conversation with ministers who relied on structured training in delivery. The preachers whose sermons he edited, Spurgeon, Beecher, Brooks, Newman, and others, formed a canon he urged students to study for clarity, force, and moral weight. In the broader landscape of public-speaking education, he stood among authors who brought elocution into the modern era of self-instruction. Later popularizers of practical oratory would operate in a tradition that Kleiser helped to shape by insisting on repeatable methods and daily discipline.

Reception and Reach
Kleiser's books found steady readers among professionals who spoke for a living, ministers, lawyers, teachers, as well as among clerks, salespeople, and civic leaders seeking advancement. Libraries and correspondence schools adopted his volumes because they combined portability with structure. Reviewers frequently noted the usefulness of his compilations and the directness of his counsel. His phrase books and anthologies traveled widely, aided by inexpensive editions that placed systematic self-culture within reach of ordinary readers. The durability of his titles, many later reprinted in the public domain, attests to their practicality more than to stylistic fashion.

Later Years and Legacy
Kleiser continued to write and revise throughout his later years, issuing new collections, calendars of daily readings, and refinements of earlier courses. He remained focused on the fundamentals: clarity of thought, fitness of words, and disciplined practice. He died in 1935, having left a shelf of books that continued to circulate long after his passing. In the decades since, his name has remained associated with usable guides to speech and expression. Students still consult his compilations to model sentences, enrich vocabulary, and learn from masters of the spoken word. His legacy endures in the ordinary yet transformative premise that eloquence can be taught, step by step, day by day, with fine examples, patient practice, and a clear moral purpose.

Our collection contains 6 quotes who is written by Grenville, under the main topics: Motivational - Change - Habits - Mental Health - Self-Discipline.