Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
Mark TwainRead
For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment
Interpretation
This quote reflects on how people often feel regret about their past decisions while viewing the future as uncertain and experimental.
Mark Twain's quote emphasizes the tendency of individuals to dwell on past regrets and to regard their future with a sense of experimentation and uncertainty. It suggests that while we may feel burdened by the mistakes and lost opportunities of our past, we should approach the future with an open mind and willingness to explore new possibilities, even if they are fraught with risk and unknown outcomes.
In practice
During a motivational speech about embracing change and uncertainty.
Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need; the remainder is needed by others.
When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he's often sure he can find one. And that's a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.
When you're 20 or 30, looking ahead, you see these benchmarks for relationships, career, ambition, sexuality, and they went off into infinity. When you get to 50, you look at what's ahead of you, and there's an end. It goes into a nothingness, a void.
History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.
Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.
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