The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.
Interpretation
Living fully requires engagement and interest; boredom indicates a lack of vitality.
This quote by Arnold Bennett highlights the importance of being actively engaged in life and suggests that routine and monotony can lead to boredom, which is a sign of not truly living. It advocates for a life filled with excitement, curiosity, and meaningful activities, implying that one should strive for a more vibrant existence rather than conforming to a dull and predictable routine.
In practice
During a motivational workshop to inspire attendees to find passion in their daily lives.
The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it. And they have attained it by realizing that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.
Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely
Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.
You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a timetable with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once.If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions;_x000D_ if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.
Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.
Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself.
Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.
Life, like poker has an element of risk. It shouldn't be avoided. It should be faced.
I'm in a place in my life where I get offered parts that I didn't get offered before - fathers and uncles and grandfathers and so on. And it took me a long time to get to that place, but I'm glad because it opens up new territory.
It is important to remember that life is not a dress rehearsal and that none of us should waste our time on doing things that donβt spark fires within us. My golden rule for business and life is: We should all enjoy what we do and do what we enjoy.
Oh, I know I'll improve. It's just that my life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes now. That's a sentence I read once, and I say it over to comfort myself in these times that try the soul.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.