You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist.
Interpretation
Fear can paralyze us from truly living or accepting our mortality.
This quote suggests that living in fear—whether of death or of the challenges of life—can lead to a hollow existence. When one is afraid to engage with life fully or to confront death, it results in a superficial experience, where the richness of life is lost to anxiety and avoidance.
In practice
In a speech about living authentically, one might say this quote to emphasize the importance of overcoming fear.
What you hope, you will eventually believe. _x000D_ What you believe you will eventually know. What you know, you will eventually create. What you create, _x000D_ you will eventually experience. What you experience, _x000D_ you will eventually express. What you express, _x000D_ you will eventually become. _x000D_ This is the formula for all of life.
Fear and guilt are your only enemies. Love and awareness are your true friends. Do not confuse one with the other, for one will kill you, while the other gives you life.
Your whole life is a message. Every act is an act of self-definition . Everything you think, say and do sends a message about you.
Love lets go. Need holds on. This is the way you can tell the difference between need and love. Let go of expectation, let go of requirements and rules and regulations that you would impose on your loved ones.
When you find peace within, you also find that you can do without. This means simply that you no longer need the things of your outside world, and not needing is a great freedom.
Giving up is not the answer. Neither is giving in. Stand your ground. There is a way of doing that without having to be combative. There is a way of hanging on to your true self, and demonstrating it, without resorting to aggression. But giving up and giving in is not the way. Simply and quietly claiming your right to be You is the way.
The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection.
All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.
Loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.
...And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all.
Spiritual people don't float around all day on clouds of glory; they live in the real world and deal with real issues in real ways.
I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don't just think, 'Yes, my country is doing well,' but you think about the world at large.
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