In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.
Interpretation
We shape our future and beliefs through our inner convictions and feelings.
This quote by Herman Melville emphasizes the power of personal agency in shaping the future and creating our own beliefs or realities. It suggests that our internal world influences not just our lives but also the broader world around us, highlighting the significance of introspection and faith in the construction of personal and collective destiny.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal growth.
A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
The Marquesan girls dance all over; not only do their feet dance, but their arms, hands, fingers, ay, their very eyes seem to dance in their heads.
Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.
Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.
You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.... We are not a nation, so much as a world.
It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.
Nirvana means to extinguish the burning fires of the Three Poisons: greed, anger, and ignorance. This can be accomplished by letting go of dissatisfaction.
Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.
Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.
The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.
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