There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
T. S. EliotRead
Humankind can't stand too much reality.
Interpretation
People often struggle to cope with the harsh truths of life.
T. S. Eliot's quote suggests that humanity has a natural tendency to avoid or deny uncomfortable realities. This notion highlights the psychological barriers people create to protect themselves from the often harsh truths of existence, implying that facing reality can be overwhelming and difficult.
In practice
During a talk on mental health, one might quote this to illustrate the challenges people face in confronting their issues.
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
For I have known them all already, known them allβ Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.
Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as right in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as brute force.
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.
The more completely we give of ourselves, the more completely the world gives back to us.
Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.
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