To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated.
Interpretation
Living involves skillfully navigating and adapting to the challenges and constraints we face.
Bertolt Brecht's quote suggests that the essence of life lies in our ability to skillfully manage and adapt to the various processes and circumstances that control us. It implies that true living is not just about survival but about mastering the art of maneuvering through life's complexities with finesse and awareness.
In practice
During a motivational speech, to encourage adapting to challenges.
The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs.... Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his or her own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other's faces.
In proportion as a church is holy, in that proportion will its testimony for Christ be powerful.
I was Catholic. You talk about a minority within a minority within a minority: a black Catholic in Savannah, GA.
To continue living, we have to die. That's the story of humanity - generation after generation - that we are going to die. There's nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one's life.
It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.
Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can't persist much longer. If it does, then we won't.
Wait a minute! Wait a minute! I figured this out. I know what's wrong with what we've done in Iraq. We've been following time as it goes forward. What a classic mistake. Linear time is so pre-9-11.
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