Words, words and words

"All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind." - Khalil Gibran, Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

People may hate words and people may love words; but what is important is to get them right because modern man lives and breathes words. Words are under your control until you speak them; but you come under their control, once you have spoken them. Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by humanity and so, words can light fires in the minds of men; and wring tears from the hardest hearts.

They can be like X-rays: they will go through anything if you use them properly, and pierce the minds of men, and women alike. Words bring clarity, reason, and gives shape to things. Therefore, be aware, and watch your thoughts because they become words; watch your words for they become actions; watch your actions for they become habits; watch your habits for they become your character; and watch your character, for it becomes your destiny. What we think, we become. Hence, always think, "I am fine". Words could be twisted and turned into any shape: promises made to lull the heart and seduce the soul can be broken.

Thus, words can become a pretext to bluff, deceive, humbug, lie, mislead, pretend, and sham. It can also be the door to the wonderful world of imagination, and may be the reason why William Shakespeare said, "The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." - A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Words may speak the mind of man; yet, it is not always that a man's thoughts are, reflected in his words. Perhaps, nature designed the kiss as a lovely trick to stop speech when words become superfluous; for it is the inner bond that draws, one person to another, not words.

Lovers would sit with no words exchanged; but their eyes would speak all the time. His eyes might say "I love you" and hers would say, "I am sleepy"; and I suppose I should say - frailty thy name is modern love.

Be that as it is, in the final analysis, when it comes to human relationships, words mean nothing. Words are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast.

Spoken

Sometimes not speaking says more than all the words in the world; and at times, the wisest man is the silent one because amongst his most prized possessions are words that are never spoken. Hence, when a man is silent, examine his actions; judge him by them.

Do not always be persuaded by word, whether spoken with intent or without; because it is action that speaks and not words. Still for all, in a world where vows are worthless, where making a pledge means nothing and where promises are, made to be broken; it would be nice to see words come back into power because all the ideas in the universe can be, described by words.

Wrap your dreams in words and pattern the words so that they would live forever. By putting thought to words, and words to letters, one could make them relied on as honest and truthful; because in written words you could trust, understand them, and is easier to spot a lie; they could not change half way through a sentence like tongues of people.

Words may be the product of wind; but words have consequences. There are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they become spoken words - especially in people whose words emanate from the opposite end as wind.

That is why Literature is my Utopia: it does not disenfranchise; no barrier of the senses shuts people out from the sweet, gracious discourses of books. Books talk without embarrassment or awkwardness and reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Craving

Reading awakes inside of us that long dormant craving to be mentally alive. Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people's books, one's own books - it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books: glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction.

Often, very often, while browsing haphazardly, looking for nothing in particular, you pick up a volume that suddenly excites you, and you know that this one, you must read.

Those are great moments; and the books we come across like that are often the most memorable.

Books are the repository of words. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures.

The dialogue it establishes, with its reader, and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory are irreversible.

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. Yet, books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.

Relics

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and yet, more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself.

Translated into every language it can be, read and breathed from all human lips: books are not lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. The history of the human spirit is books.

Words are fragile, yet they can build a whole, new world because they are timeless. One should utter them or write them with knowledge of their timelessness.

The use of words reflects the character of a man. Words can shape the future of a child and destroy the existence of an adult. Words and eggs must be, handled with care. Once broken, they are impossible things to repair.

Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring. Many use too many high-sounding words, but too few actions that correspond with them.

Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do because words transform the man who hears it towards the condition of the man who spoke it.

However, be careful of words, sometimes they swarm like insects and leave a sting; and always remember that appearance blinds, whereas words reveal; and very often, when words fail, silence speaks.

In fact, too many words cheapened the value of a man's speech.

Words release a sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, with a savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, shedding a flash of heat and light of awareness in the mind. Language does have the power to change reality.

Therefore, treat your words as the mighty instruments they are.

Use words to heal, to bring into being, to remove, as if by magic, the terrible violations of memory, to nurture, to cherish, to bless, to forgive - in short, to create true love. Be a man of less words, but carefully chosen ones.

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