QuoteProject
Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.
F. H. Bradley
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote suggests that the essence of our life experiences, when reduced to simple sayings, loses its emotional depth and significance.

F. H. Bradley reflects on the transformation of profound life experiences into mere words. He argues that when we attempt to encapsulate our heartfelt experiences into aphorisms or epigrams, we strip them of their richness and emotional weight, turning them into something lifeless and dull.

Themes

ExperiencesAphorismsEmotionWritingMeaning

In practice

Example use cases

During a public speaking event on the power of storytelling.

More from F. H. Bradley

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.
F. H. BradleyRead
Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.
F. H. BradleyRead
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
F. H. BradleyRead
True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.
F. H. BradleyRead
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.
F. H. BradleyRead
One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.
F. H. BradleyRead

Similar quotes

Once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.
Lewis CarrollRead
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
Wallace StevensRead
The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable.
Michelle AlexanderRead
Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent...this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
Alan WattsRead
I only do this because I'm having fun. The day I stop having fun, I'll just walk away. I wasn't going to have fun doing a teen movie again. I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. I don't. I don't even want to spend the rest of my youth doing this in this industry. There's so much more I want to discover.
Heath LedgerRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.