Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that it's better to be actively engaged with life's challenges through thought and theory than to passively accept everything without understanding.
Robert Louis Stevenson emphasizes the importance of awareness and critical thinking in the face of life's inconsistencies and difficulties. Rather than being complacently indifferent and accepting circumstances as they are, he advocates for a proactive approach where exploring ideas and theories can provide clarity and insight into our experiences.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing challenges, this quote can illustrate the need for critical analysis.
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.
That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters . . . I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.
Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.
It may be that there is no such thing as an equable motion, whereby time may be accurately measured. All motions may be accelerated or retarded, but the true, or equable, progress of absolute time is liable to no change.
We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.
Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.
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