Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Interpretation
Life's significant events and changes often occur without our awareness or direct involvement.
This quote suggests that many important experiences, developments, and moments in a person's life happen when they are not actively present or involved. It highlights the idea that life continues to unfold and evolve beyond our immediate perceptions and actions, encouraging us to recognize the value and impact of everything that happens outside our direct focus.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, one might say this quote to highlight the unseen influences in our lives.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
I think that certainty is a closed door, It's the end of the conversation. Doubt is an open door.
Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.
I insist that men shall have the right to work out their lives in their own way, always allowing to others the right to work out their lives in their own way, too.
Youth is an unpleasant period; for then it is not possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.
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