There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.Read
The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.
Interpretation
Recognizing our limitations and acknowledging a higher power is a fundamental act of faith.
The quote highlights the importance of humility and the understanding that humans are not omnipotent or omniscient. By acknowledging our limitations and the existence of a higher power or purpose, we can achieve a deeper sense of faith and clarity in our lives.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the importance of humility.
There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it.
Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.
...human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse.
All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.
I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.
Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
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