Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.
Interpretation
Life is inherently filled with suffering and challenges, yet we must find ways to deny or overcome this suffering as we live.
In this quote, Thomas Wolfe reflects on the human condition, suggesting that while life inevitably involves suffering and ultimately death, it is essential for individuals to resist accepting that fate as they navigate their journey. This paradox highlights the struggle between acknowledging life's harsh realities and the necessity of maintaining hope and meaning throughout one's life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about resilience in the face of adversity.
My dear, dear girl [. . .] we can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire--a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron--which we cannot get back.
What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.
The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know β the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to beβ¦. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.
Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.
The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart....To go alone...into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth--it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.
If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.
Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty.
In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.
There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
OUR ORDINATION: Sir Isaac Newton, 1642 β 1747 About the times of the End, a body of men will be raised up who will turn their attention to the prophecies, and insist upon their literal interpretation, in the midst of much clamor and opposition.
The best reason for exposing oneself to foreign ways is to generate a sense of vitality and awareness - an interest in life which can come only when one lives through the shock of contrast and difference.
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