Life is not something to be lived through: it is something to be lived up to. It is a privilege, not a penal servitude of so many decades on earth.
Interpretation
Life should be embraced as a privilege rather than endured as a burden.
This quote emphasizes the idea that life is a valuable experience that should be actively engaged with and cherished. Instead of merely getting through life as if it were a punishment, we should aspire to live it fully and with appreciation for the opportunities it presents.
In practice
In a motivational speech about pursuing aspirations, this quote inspires people to truly engage with their goals.
Plants grow most in the darkest hours preceding dawn; so do human souls. Nature always pays for a brave fight. Sometimes she pays in strengthened moral muscle, sometimes in deepened spiritual insight, sometimes in a broadening, mellowing, sweetening of the fibres of character,βbut she always pays.
Self-confidence without self-reliance is as useless as a cooking recipe without food. Self-confidence sees the possibilities of the individual; self-reliance realizes them. Self-confidence sees the angel in the unhewn block of marble; self-reliance carves it out for oneself.
Love, in the divine alchemy of life, transmutes all duties into privileges, all responsibilities into joys.
It is the most powerful creation to have life growing inside of you. There is no bigger gift.
A human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each time with its own particular beauty and power. And gift. By focusing on springtime and summer, we have turned the natural process of life into a process of loss rather than a process of celebration and appreciation. Life is neither linear nor stagnant. It is movement from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.
To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the feet of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down.
The simple life on the farm was everything to me. Nothing was more relaxing after a long plane flight than to reach the winding driveway that led up to my house. The quiet of the night was more soothing than a sleeping pill.
Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.
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