Words sing. They hurt. They teach. They sanctify. They were man's first, immeasurable feat of magic. They liberated us from ignorance and our barbarous past.
Interpretation
Words have a powerful impact on human life, shaping understanding and transforming society.
In this quote, Leo Rosten highlights the profound nature of words as more than mere communication tools; they possess the ability to evoke emotions, impart knowledge, and elevate humanity. Rosten underscores how language empowers people to rise above ignorance and barbarism, marking it as humanity's first significant achievement that has lasting effects on civilization.
In practice
During a graduation speech to highlight the importance of education.
Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.
I never cease being dumbfounded by the unbelievable things people believe.
I came to believe it not true that "the coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man only one." I think it is the other way around: It is the brave who die a thousand deaths. For it is imagination, and not just conscience, which doth make cowards of us all. Those who do not know fear are not truly brave.
The fellow who laughs last may laugh best, but he gets the reputation of being very slow-witted.
The purpose of life is to matter, to be productive, to have it make a difference that you lived at all-using the talents that God has given you for the betterment of others.
Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.
In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century could say without exaggeration, "Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years." Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, "By studying the masters, not the pupils."
Tomorrow is the day when idlers work, and fools reform, and mortal men lay hold on heaven.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If people speak or act with evil thoughts, pain follows them. If people speak or act with pure thoughts, happiness follows them, like a shadow that never leaves them.
I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.
Investigate what is, and not what pleases.
Sweat more during peace: bleed less during war
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