But we never tell the truth. We cannot properly 'tell' the truth, because our words are crude tools to express something, 'the truth', which may well exist, but which we cannot define.
I'm so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I'm misunderstood.
Look inside your soul and find your tools. We all have tools and have to live with the help of them. I have two tools—my words and my images.
Language both reflects and shapes society. Culture shapes language and then language shapes culture. Little wonder that the words we use to talk to each other, and about each other, are the most important words in our language: they tell us who I am, they tell us who you are, they tell us who 'they' are.
Words don't tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It's all disguise. It's all hidden -- a secret language.
I have learned to accept it, even ask for it, this 'more than I can handle.' Because in these times, God shows Himself victorious. He reminds me that all of this life requires more of Him and less of me. God does give us more than we can handle. Not maliciously, but intentionally, in love, that His glory may be displayed, that we may have no doubt of who is in control, that people may see His grace and faithfulness shining through our lives.
We'll tell fear it can come along with us in our minivan, okay? But we'll just tell fear it can't drive. Sometimes we'll tell it to not even talk. Like when we tell our kids, 'Enough. No words.' We're going to play the quiet game with fear. Fear is not the boss of us.
The New York Yankees' organization - they train us well from the get-go. They tell us how to handle everything.
The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Words may be either the servants or masters. If the former they may safely guide us in the way of truth. If the latter they intoxicate the brain and lead into swamps of thought where there is no solid footing. Among the sources of those innumerable calamities which from age to age have overwhelmed mankind, may be reckoned as one of the principal, the abuse of words.
How people keep correcting us when we are young! There is always some bad habit or other they tell us we ought to get over. Yet most bad habits are tools to help us through life.
Long words, fat talk they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?
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. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.
What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.
There are times in the lives of most of us, when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.