"When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language"
About this Quote
James Earl Jones celebrates language as the deepest human achievement because it makes interior life shareable. Great literature, drama, speeches, and sermons are not just words on a page or sounds in the air; they are a bridge by which one mind crosses into another. Through them, feelings too complex for gesture and thoughts too intricate for instinct become common property. The marvel is not that we think, but that we can pass our thinking and feeling along with precision, music, and empathy.
His perspective carries weight because of his own path. As a child, he struggled with a debilitating stutter and was largely silent. A teacher invited him to recite poetry, and in that act he found a voice. From Shakespeare on stage to the gravitas of Darth Vader and the warmth of Mufasa, he has lived at the meeting point of text and breath, where language is not only understood but embodied. He knows that words become most alive when carried by a human voice to a listening mind.
The forms he names reveal what he values. Literature and drama refine expression; speeches and sermons create communal understanding and moral purpose. These genres have moved nations, sustained faith, and consoled the lonely. They also travel across time, letting the dead speak to the living and the living answer back. Compared with inventions that conquer distance or disease, language is the quiet technology that makes those conquests meaningful, because it binds experience into shared sense.
There is a democratic humility in placing the highest achievement not in dominance over nature but in communion with one another. Language invites the listener to complete the circuit, to co-create meaning. For an actor who has made a career amplifying the cadence and clarity of words, the pinnacle of the mind is not the solitary spark but the communicated flame. The human mind at its greatest is a chorus, and language is the song that lets us sing together.
His perspective carries weight because of his own path. As a child, he struggled with a debilitating stutter and was largely silent. A teacher invited him to recite poetry, and in that act he found a voice. From Shakespeare on stage to the gravitas of Darth Vader and the warmth of Mufasa, he has lived at the meeting point of text and breath, where language is not only understood but embodied. He knows that words become most alive when carried by a human voice to a listening mind.
The forms he names reveal what he values. Literature and drama refine expression; speeches and sermons create communal understanding and moral purpose. These genres have moved nations, sustained faith, and consoled the lonely. They also travel across time, letting the dead speak to the living and the living answer back. Compared with inventions that conquer distance or disease, language is the quiet technology that makes those conquests meaningful, because it binds experience into shared sense.
There is a democratic humility in placing the highest achievement not in dominance over nature but in communion with one another. Language invites the listener to complete the circuit, to co-create meaning. For an actor who has made a career amplifying the cadence and clarity of words, the pinnacle of the mind is not the solitary spark but the communicated flame. The human mind at its greatest is a chorus, and language is the song that lets us sing together.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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