Words about words about words

Today in my Honors Seminar in Writing class, we spent some time discussing words. The point my teacher and the editor of our summer reading book made was that we both enter and leave our lives as words. Before we are born, we are a whispered rumor, words formed of a life that has not yet happened. After we die, we are a memory, remembered through stories, words a life that once was.

And so, I beg to wonder, do actions really speak louder than words? I understand where the expression came from, but if you take the time to think about it, it feels less and less inspirational.

If, as my teacher suggested, we leave this world in words, than those words become our legacy. Once we are gone and can no longer act for ourselves, we become whatever it is that people say about us. This legacy, this accumulation of words, will exist for a duration time (hopefully) longer than that in which we lived. So, how could the actions you made on earth be more prominent than the things people will say about those actions? True, we must do loud things to have loud words said about us, but ultimately it is those words, not those actions, that will face a slower silence.