Life & Wisdom Quote by Malcolm De Chazal

Language, De Chazal suggests, is a kind of elegant fraud: the face says one thing, the sentence says another, and the gap between them is where “humanity” lives. The line lands because it refuses the comforting idea that words are our most honest tool. Instead, words become a workaround for what we cannot, or will not, show directly. “Expression” is bodily: tone, posture, micro-reactions, the involuntary truth. “Words” are chosen: filtered through etiquette, strategy, self-image, and the desire to control how we’re read. They “never coincide” not because we’re uniquely complex, but because we’re uniquely committed to managing appearances.

The animals are a sly mirror here. We like to imagine they don’t understand us because they lack language; De Chazal flips it. They don’t understand because we are inconsistent signals. Animals read the body with ruthless literalness; they respond to tension, softness, threat, invitation. Humans, by contrast, can smile while refusing, flatter while despising, apologize while continuing. The sentence implies that what separates us from animals isn’t speech but duplicity - or, more charitably, the sophisticated social performance required by communal life.

Context matters: De Chazal, writing in the 20th-century modernist afterglow, is suspicious of rational, polished discourse and drawn to the fractures between inner life and public expression. The wit is in the sting: we didn’t evolve language to reveal ourselves. We evolved it to get away with not being fully seen.