Life & Wisdom Quote by Matthew Prior

Nothing ages faster than empty noise, and Prior skewers it with the tidy cruelty of a couplet. "And 'tis remarkable that they talk most who have the least to say" works because it performs the very economy it praises: a single, balanced sentence that lands like a verdict. The line isn’t just a complaint about chatterboxes; it’s a social diagnosis of how status, insecurity, and attention operate in public life.

Prior writes as a poet and courtly observer in an England thick with salons, coffeehouses, Parliament talk, and the rising culture of print. Speech is currency in these spaces. His sly "remarkable" signals mock amazement, a posture of detached superiority that lets him condemn without sounding openly bitter. The aphorism’s symmetry is the point: "talk most" versus "least to say" exposes a perverse ratio between volume and value. It hints that verbosity is often compensatory, a way to occupy space you haven’t earned with substance.

The subtext carries a sharper edge: the problem isn’t merely that some people waste breath, but that audiences reward performance over meaning. Prior implies a marketplace where confidence is mistaken for insight, and where silence can look like weakness. The line flatters the reader into self-recognition (of course we’re the discerning ones) while quietly warning that we might be complicit, mistaking noise for presence.

It still reads modern because it captures a durable social mechanism: the loudest voice in the room is frequently the one most desperate to be heard, not the one most worth hearing.