I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
James Russell LowellRead
Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the relationship between life and death, suggesting that life can feel constraining, while death offers liberation.
James Russell Lowell's quote uses the metaphor of life as a jailer to describe how it can confine us, burdening us with the struggles and constraints we face. In contrast, death is depicted as an angel that comes to free us from this imprisonment, symbolizing the idea that death might be a release from life's hardships and a transition to a state of freedom.
In practice
This quote can be shared at a memorial service to reflect on the nature of life and death.
I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
All men in their hearts, I say, bear witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand it.
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.
The final goal ... is to grasp the native's point of view, _x000D_ his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.
Civilization is first of all a moral thing. Without truth, respect for duty, love of neighbor, and virtue, everything is destroyed. The morality of a society is alone the basis of civilization.
In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.
There comes a moment when the things one has written, even a traveler's memories, stand up and demand a justification. They require an explanation. They query, 'Who am I? What is my name? Why am I here?
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