For life is but a dream whose shapes return, some frequently, some seldom, some by night and some by day.
Interpretation
Life is transient and often fleeting, resembling a dream with varying experiences.
This quote by James Thomson conveys the idea that life is ephemeral and resembles a dream in its unpredictability. The 'shapes' of our experiences appear at different times, suggesting that the events and moments we encounter ebb and flow, capturing the essence of permanence in an inherently temporary existence.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing change and uncertainty in life.
Everything we do these days - our lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusal to engage with the mandates of reality, our fidelity to cults of technology and limitless growth, our narcissistic national exceptionalism - all of this propels us toward the realm where souls abandon all hope.
Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.
Death is an ascension to a better library.
The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.
State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people’s belief that they have failed.
We all have appointments with the past.
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