Life never presents us with anything which may not be looked upon as a fresh starting point, no less than as a termination.
Interpretation
Life offers continuous opportunities for renewal and change, regardless of endings.
In this quote, Andre Gide emphasizes the cyclical nature of life where every ending can also represent a new beginning. He invites us to view lifeβs transitions not merely as conclusions, but as fresh opportunities that can lead to growth and new experiences, encouraging an optimistic perspective on change.
In practice
Use this quote in a graduation speech to inspire students about future opportunities.
Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.
Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.
Through fear of resembling one another, through horror of having to submit, through uncertainty as well, through skepticism and complexity, there is a multitude of individual little beliefs for the triumph of strange little individuals.
It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing.
It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.
I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.
The forms are evanescent; but the spirit, being in the Lord and of the Lord, is immortal and omnipresent.
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
Heaven and Earth are not kind. They regard all things as offerings.
Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the whiteβs front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
Religion is the opiate of the people.
The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.
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