A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
Charles PeguyRead
Life holds only one tragedy, ultimately: not to have been a saint.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the significance of striving to be virtuous and morally upright.
Charles Peguy's quote conveys the idea that the greatest tragedy in life is not about facing external hardships or failures, but rather failing to live a life of virtue and moral excellence. It emphasizes the importance of aspiring to be a 'saint' β a person who embodies goodness, compassion, and integrity β as a measure of a meaningful and fulfilling life.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about living a purposeful life.
A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
I prefer a saint with faults to a sinner with none.
Any father whose son raises his hand against him is guilty of having produced a son who raised his hand against him.
Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love.
Hers was a memory made up of snapshorts: being dragged through the snow by a pack of wolves, first kiss tasting of oranges, saying goodbye behind a cracked windshield. A life made up of promises of what could be: the possibilities contained in a stack of college applications, the thrill of sleeping under a strange roof, the future that lay in Sam's smile. It was a life I didn't want to leave behind. It was a life I didn't want to forget I wasn't done with it yet. There was so much more to say.
So all in all there wasn't anything really wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else's I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn't know how to fill it or even know what belonged there.
For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.
There are moments that you suffer a lot, moments you won't photograph. There are some people you like better than others. But you give, you receive, you cherish, you are there. When you are really there, you know when you see the picture later what you are seeing.
That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.
Gentleman-rankers out on the spree, damned from here to Eternity.
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