We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.
Arthur SchopenhauerRead
Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
Interpretation
Life can be viewed as a series of daily experiences, each with its own significance.
Schopenhauer's quote suggests that each day we live is akin to a miniature version of life itself, marked by the cycles of waking, living, and resting. By equating our daily experiences to stages of life, he encourages us to recognize the value and transience of each day, urging us to appreciate the present moment as a brief yet meaningful existence.
In practice
In a motivational speech about mindfulness and living in the moment.
We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.
To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves. We must never allow our suffering to be compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in suffering so deeply. There would be something amiss if we didn't.
Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.
Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.
Our religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.
We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor.
Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied.
As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.
As with many Southern Writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the people who dwell upon it.
Remembrance is a form of meeting.
In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine.
Now I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.