Think before you speak. We have all, undoubtedly, heard this expression before. Maybe our elders or peers have encouraged us to count to ten before saying something. Or as Thumper, from Bambi, reminds us,

“If you can’t say something nice don’t say nothin’ at all.”

But do we really understand the reason that we should think before we speak? If we look at the example from Thumper we can see that sometimes when we don’t think before we speak we may end up saying something harmful to others.

Or as Abraham Lincoln put it,

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

President Lincoln reminds us that staying silent, or thoroughly thinking through how our words may come across could save us much embarrassment from saying something foolish.

Yet I believe deeper reasons exist for thinking before we speak. I prefer, actually, the phrase “Reflect before you speak.” Reflection, more so than simply thinking, has a connotation of doing some internal verification with our conscience, whereas thinking represents more the faculties of the brain and logic. Maybe we should do both, or maybe for us each word carries the meaning of the other. While this may seem a debate in semantics, the underlying implications are very meaningful.

“Speech,” as the early 20th century American writer, John Andrew Holmes put it,

is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.

Too often we think through our thoughts out loud. While such a practice may work for certain circumstances, we should understand that the thinking, or reflecting, faculty is meant to help us process internally and words or speech should come only after we have internally verified that such words are inline with our conscience or morals.

Human beings cannot have words without first having a thought. Often the thought precursor to the word may be short and unnoticeable. This could be a good thing if we need to quickly respond to a situation. However, we really should develop a practice of thinking through the meanings and implications of our words before we send them off to never return.

There is a phrase that

Even seven wild horses cannot drag back our words once they leave our mouths.

Think about how many less apologies people would have to make if they simply thought through their words a little more carefully. Or how many poor promises we enter into or opportunities we miss out on because we did not think through our responses a little more carefully.

Still, no matter how much thinking we do before we say something, we must have a compassionate and stable set of principles to guide our thoughts or reflection. Marinating our words in angry or bitter thoughts will only make rash words more severe. We must also try to calm down our mind when we think through our thoughts or actions.

Only when our reflections improve the quality and kindness of our speech do we really bring benefit to ourselves and others by thinking before we speak.