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Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Sterile Quotations

Quotations are so powerless and futile. Especially if the listener doest believe in them. And more so, if the speaker doesn't believe in them. 'HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY.' We all seem to know it. Most of us seem to equate the act of knowing about the existence of something with the actual knowledge of it. That's a fallacy. Merely being aware about a quotation just gives us a few extra words to decorate our speech or writing. Nothing more!

These deceptively simply worded quotations were originally uttered by extra-ordinary people at a moment of great inspiration that brew in relentless faith, convection and toil, and concentrates a monumental success. Extraordinary people keep coming and rediscovering the power and meaning of these quotations. Thus these quotations live on. All this while, they are spat at by ordinary mortals as simplistic, outdated and meaningless. Villains do worse. than ignoring their value. They bastardise those precious statements by uttering them as fodder of their hypocrisy resulting in many listeners losing faith in these quotations, as it eventually always gets clears that the person from whom they had learned it himself neither believed in nor followed those words.

Quotations aren't meaningless. They hide in their breast hundreds of success-stories. The reason why these quotations exist almost timelessly is due to the power of these successes; not because of the parroting of ordinary people like us.

The best thing to do is not to desensitise ourselves to quotations but to rediscovery their meaning in our day to day activities.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like it's hitting me! ;) A worthwhile thought.

The rediscovery, I think shall be done with a room of permission to update the quotations. The updation that we do - could also be from the best moment of our realisations. The original still lives, nevertheless.

Anonymous said...

Considering that true achievers who believe what they say may be rarer than parrots of quotations, I feel a little grateful although somewhat corruptly to the latter for keeping the original quotation echoing alive. :)

I recall making true sense of quotations not by starting with them, but by remembering them at an appropriate situation and feeling assured in that somebody good had felt this before. :)