When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.
Garrison KeillorRead
Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.
Interpretation
There is always kindness and goodness to be found, even amidst a world filled with arrogance and greed.
Garrison Keillor's quote suggests that despite the overwhelming presence of pride and materialism in society, one can still find hope and goodness in the actions of compassionate individuals. The imagery of 'campfires of gentle people' evokes a sense of warmth and community, indicating that acts of kindness, though possibly overshadowed, remain a vital and observable part of human experience.
In practice
During a speech about social responsibility and community service, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of kindness.
When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.
Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.
Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won't feel so thankful then.
I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved.
When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.
And for me anyway, consciousness is three components: a personal component which for lack of a better word we can call the soul. A collective component which is more archetypal and a deeper level, and then a universal domain of consciousness.
Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.
Oh Senor" said the niece. "Your grace should send them to be burned (books), just like all the rest, because it's very likely that my dear uncle, having been cured of the chivalric disease, will read these and want to become a shepherd and wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing and, what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease.
So great an advantage is given to sin and Satan by your temper and disposition, that without extraordinary watchfulness, care, and diligence, they will prevail against your soul.
In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.
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