Words need to be sown like seed.

From Seneca, Letters from a Stoic translated by Robin Campbell.

LETTER XXXVIII

You are quite right in urging that we should exchange letters oftener.  The utmost benefit comes from talk because it steals little by little into the mind.  Lectures prepared before­ hand and delivered before a listening audience are more re­sounding but less intimate.  Philosophy is good advice, and no one gives advice at the top of his voice. Such harangues, if l may call them that, may need to be resorted to now and then where a person in a state of indecision is needing a push.  But when the object is not to make him want to learn but to get him learning, one must have recourse to these lower tones, which enter the mind more easily and stick in it.  What is required is not a lot of words but effectual ones.

Words need to be sown like seed.  No matter how tiny a seed may be, when it lands in the right sort of ground it unfolds its strength and from being minute expands and grows to a massive size.  Reason does the same; to the outward eye its dimensions may be insignificant, but with activity it starts developing.  Although the words spoken are few, if the mind has taken them in as it should they gather strength and shoot upwards.  Yes, precepts have the same features as seeds: they are of compact dimensions and they produce impressive results - given, as I say, the right sort of mind, to grasp at and assimilate them.  The mind will then respond by being in its tum creative and will produce a yield exceeding what was put into it.

 

Effectual words require a sympathetic understanding of the audience.  Such sympathetic understanding is missing in much of our national discourse.  To the detriment of that discourse and to our collective well-being.