Do Pictures Speak Louder Than Words?

I wrote this on Quora, but I thought I’d share it on my blog, as I think the message here is quite powerful.

Here it is, Do you pictures speak louder than words?

Yes. Pictures do speak louder than words, generally speaking, but I don’t think that has much do with the lack of power in words, more so than the fact our words today have become quite powerless.

But I think the reason why pictures can be so powerful is that it’s a more direct form of art, and that’s what’s speaking so loud, the artistic nature of the picture, not so much the picture itself.

You might ask, what is this artistic nature of the picture?
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Why do we get so engulfed watching a powerful movie?

How can a book, say, 100 pages or so, fundamentally change the way we view the world?

It’s because it’s speaking a message we all know, but maybe forgot. It’s the spirit (you could call it) that lives inside of us, yearning to come alive.

But we’ve come to the age of rational thinking, where science is king, and emotions and spiritualism, they’re no longer valid, stupid and delusional, as many atheists put it.

In a sense, we’ve killed the fundamental part of our soul that allows us to derive meaning in our lives, to bear the sufferings of the world, and with dignity.

We’ve killed the part that makes us an individual, a divine being. It’s the part that finds meaning in life, even in the cruelest of sufferings.

And that’s what Nietzsche meant when “God is Dead”

It was not a triumphant claim, but a catastrophe. It means that, we’ve lost the very essence of what it means to be human.

To, as Frankl and Dostoevsky put it, become worthy of our suffering.

Carl Jung put it this way, the reason why we’re unable to find God, in the modern age is because, “Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.”

So yes, pictures do speak louder than words, but is it because we’ve lost our humility to speak those words ourselves?

thanks for reading,

-cory