Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss.
Interpretation
Spoken words can have lasting effects, often more than physical inscriptions, impacting our memories and relationships.
This quote emphasizes the profound impact that spoken words can have on individuals and relationships. While we might try to brush aside hurtful comments by attributing them to anger or temporary emotions, the reality is that such words leave a lasting impression on our minds. In contrast, physical representations of words, like those on monuments, often fade and disappear over time. The quote poignantly highlights the idea that while we might strive to preserve certain memories or words, it is often the painful or damaging words that remain etched in our minds.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a workshop on effective communication to highlight how words can affect people.
Now I felt the long-forgotten urgency of lovemaking, when it seems one's human selves leave, to be replaced by hungry beasts bolting their food. Gone are the civilized beings who talk of manners and journeys and letters; in their places are two bodies straining to give birth to a burst of inhuman pleasure followed by a great, floating nothingness. An explosion of life followed by death - in this we live, and in this we foreshadow our own sweet deaths.
The human body is a steed that goes freest and longest under a light rider, and the lightest of all riders is a cheerful heart.
Excellence is the eternal quest. We achieve it by living up to our highest intellectual standards and our finest moral intuitions. In seeking excellence, take life seriously-but never yourself!
Reality - the way that is, exactly as it is, in every moment - is always kind. It's our story about reality that blurs our vision, obscures what's true, and leads us to believe that there is injustice in the world. I sometimes say that you move totally away from reality when you believe that there is a legitimate reason to suffer.
The hard discipline, with the exception of one great good point, is fraught with evil. The good point is that men can do one or two things well with very little effort, having practiced them every day through generations.
I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'
He said true things, but called them by wrong names.
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