« Those who talk all the time never say anything. »

(Marlo Morgann, 'Message from Eternity')   Contributions by Marlo Morgann on the subject of:

The WAY, Relationships, LIFE, Suffering or HEALTH

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Words and vanity

   « The search for truth can only be done in silence, it would take long hours of peace before addressing certain subjects. This is why these areopagus of intellectuals who, one after the other proclaim their opinions on such and such a subject, could be related to meetings of mental exhibitionism.
 In these colloquia where eloquence takes on such great importance, nothing really profound is broached. This mode of exchange is distorted by the desire to shine. These talks are illusionist's games, the man likes to listen to himself speak. »

 « Caricature of the gift. And he rises to speak at banquets. It bends towards the guests like a tree heavy with its fruits. But the guests have nothing to pick.

 But there are always those who think they are picking because they are more foolish than the first, and consider themselves honored by him. And if he knows it, the vain one, he believes that he has given since the guest has received. And they sway in front of each other like two barren trees. »

The word and the thought

  « To speak is to densify (materialize a thought).
 To put into words is to structure in matter, therefore to limit in narrow substances. »

 « I need sustained vigilance to achieve the mysterious alchemy between the word and the inner image to convey.

 I shudder at the monstrous waste of dead words that clutter up all our reports, reducing them most often to a dialogue of the deaf, where everyone listens to themselves. »

(Jeanne Guesné, 'The Great Passage')   Contributions by Jeanne Guesné on the theme of:

The WAY, Relationships, LIFE, Suffering or DEATH

 « Retains the spirit rather than the sign. Absorb the marrow of the words I am about to speak and abandon their carcass. »

(D. Meurois and A. Givaudan, 'Terre d'émeraude')   Contributions by Anne Givaudan on the theme of:

The WAY, Relationships, LIFE, Suffering, HEALTH or DEATH

 « People like order. This is why, when two realities begin to assert themselves and seem to contradict each other, one immediately assumes that one of them must be false. It takes a lot of maturity to see and accept that in fact they might both be true. »

 - Yes, said my father, you are right. And yet I don't think like you...

 (...) What the words convey is a sign that is difficult to read; the stones (of the temple) show neither shadow nor silence.

 (...) Do not listen to men speak if you wish to understand them.

 (...) It is not by way of language that I will transmit what is in me. What is in me, there are no words to say. I can only signify it insofar as you already understand it by means other than speech, because born of the same god, you resemble me.

 (...) In my youth, when people resisted the arguments by which I sought not to build but to dress my thought, I abandoned the fight for lack of effective language against a lawyer better than me, but without ever renouncing my permanence, knowing that what he was demonstrating to me was simply that I was expressing myself badly. »

 « What I brought you is not a reasoning but a point of view from which to reason.

 I have not seen men transformed by the arguments of logicians. But, having addressed myself to them in essence, through the play of a ceremonial, I opened them to my light. »

  « I discovered the universality of speech. On a certain level, stripped of egocentrism, I bathe in the word which lives of its own life, and does not need me to exist.

 Here lies the mystery: if I am there with my greed, my vanity, my ambition or my anguish, my fears, my sadness and this need to always govern and control everything within me, then it will be a pedantic and ridiculous language (my usual language). But, if, by a grace whose mechanism I don't know, my little self fades away, is silent, then... the word flows by itself in a harmonious assemblage of sounds and meanings translating images that warm the heart, which speak to the whole man, and touch him in his deepest feelings.

 When it is I who speak, the verbiage is communion with the other. When “it” speaks, everything is simple and beautiful. The speaker and the listener each receive a nugget of gold. A moment is lived, neutralizing, the time of a sigh, the ice of the intellectual iceberg which sclerizes sensitivity.

 You must always address your interlocutor within the understanding that is his, using the words in the very sense that he gives them and at the level from which he receives them. »

(Jeanne Guesné, 'The Great Passage')   Contributions by Jeanne Guesné on the theme of:

The WAY, Relationships, LIFE, Suffering or DEATH