It is only after prolonged, and often painful, self-examination that any of us can realise the extent to which our minds are in bondage to words, to … - L. P. Jacks

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It is only after prolonged, and often painful, self-examination that any of us can realise the extent to which our minds are in bondage to words, to phrases, to formulae. We are the children of an age which spends the best energies of its life in the discussion of life, in an atmosphere of deferred fulfillment, continually postponing the act of living to the work of mentally preparing to live. Preoccupied with these preparations, we become skeptical as to all that lies beyond; and if for a moment we pass the boundary which separates the area of discussion from the fact discussed, our minds become troubled and amazed, and we conclude, strangely enough, that we are in a land of moonshine and of dreams.

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About L. P. Jacks

Lawrence Pearsall Jacks (9 October 1860 – 17 February 1955), usually cited as L. P. Jacks, was an English educator, philosopher, and Unitarian minister who rose to prominence in the period from World War I to World War II.

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Birth Name: Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

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Additional quotes by L. P. Jacks

"Remember, I implore you, what I have already said: that, in the spiritual world, the brain-habit is strictly confined to the working class." [2] "Before you can persuade me of all this," I said, "you will have to turn my intelligence clean inside out." "That is precisely what I intend doing, and the first step shall be taken this very instant. Begin the exercises by repeating the Formula of Initiation. It runs as follows: 'Till another speaks to me I am nothing.'" "Why, Panhandle," I said laughing, "that is the very formula they taught me when I first entered a Public School. And they enforced it with kicks." "The Universe enforces it in the same manner. But let us keep to the matter in hand. Repeat the formula at once."

Are not the richest and most significant experiences of man precisely those which are the least patient of verbal reproduction? A book, a treatise, a discourse, is the very thing that cannot contain them, that can contain at most their lower elements, their less significant aspects. Who shall transfer them to paper, write them in ink, utter them in words? And yet, though inexpressible thus, these things crave expression, for they are full of meaning and must be expressed. They have a language of their own. Art can utter some of them, and Nature, perhaps, can interpret them all. They borrow her tongues, speaking in the winds, singing in the voice of moving waters, looking down upon us in the cold shining of the stars. What they mean, we, too, can express; but we express it, not by speaking there and then, but by all that we become through their influence, by all that we are led to do, through their compelling, till life shall end.

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