Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
Interpretation
Words have power and can influence change when used thoughtfully.
This quote emphasizes the profound impact that language can have on the world. It suggests that when we choose our words carefully and communicate effectively, we have the ability to inspire, motivate, and bring about positive change in ourselves and others.
In practice
During a motivational speech, I can use this quote to highlight the importance of language in inspiring others.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
If you wish to live in peace and harmony with others, you must learn to discipline yourself in many ways.
Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self.
Pride is that which claims to be the author of what is really a gift.
Whenever you're wrong, admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up.
Avoid banquets which are given by strangers an ignorant persons. But if there is ever occasion to join them, let your attention be carefully fixed, that you slip not into the manner of the vulgar (the uninstructed).
In heaven I'll wish with all my heart that I could reclaim a thousandth part of the time I've let slip through my fingers, that I could call back those countless conversations which could have glorified my Lord-but didn't.
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