Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
My parents taught me service - not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of learning values through actions rather than mere words, particularly within family dynamics.
Alice Walker's quote reflects the deep-rooted influence of her family culture in shaping her understanding of service. It highlights how actions within a family can impart crucial life lessons and values, emphasizing that these lessons can be more powerful than verbal instruction. Service, in this context, is portrayed as an intrinsic quality that is cultivated through lived experiences and practices observed in the family unit.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about community service, one might say, 'Like Alice Walker observed, my parents taught me service by their own actions, not just their words.'
More from Alice Walker
All quotes βJune Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.
I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.
Similar quotes
There never was a woman like her. She was gentle as a dove and brave as a lioness... The memory of my mother and her teachings were, after all, the only capital I had to start life with, and on that capital I have made my way.
Instruction, and advice, and commands will profit little, unless they are backed up by the pattern of your own life. Your children will never believe you are in earnest, and really wish them to obey you, so long as your actions contradict your counsel... Think not your children will practise what they do not see you do. You are their model picture, and they will copy what you are... will seldom learn habits which they see you despise, or walk in paths in which you do not walk yourself.
The truth is that all great men have had great mothers. Great women have had, as a rule, great fathers.
My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.
I always say about my daughters, they save me from my miserable self. They take me out, you know, a comedian, you could live in your head a lot. And you're writing and you're doubting. But when I'm with my kids and my family, it's all about them.
My mother taught me to always be strong and always work hard. She's been working hard her whole life for me and my brother. I'm a lot like her in that I work hard for what I want. She taught me that.