On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us - ah! what a dream, to live in that! - the other stifles us at the first breath.
Interpretation
Life presents us with two distinct paths, one filled with potential and the other with suffocation.
This quote by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette reflects on the duality of life's choices, illustrating the struggle between pursuing our dreams, which captivates and inspires us, versus the oppressive nature of a reality that feels restrictive and stifling. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing the allure of possibility while acknowledging the weight of fear and limitation that can accompany our decisions.
In practice
A motivational speech about pursuing your dreams despite fear.
It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.
The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.
You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.
Truffles must come to the table in their own stock and as you break open this jewel sprung from a poverty-stricken soil, imagine - if you have never visited it - the desolate kingdom where it rules.
We exist, and are quoted, as standing proofs that a government, so modeled as to rest continually on the will of the whole society, is a practicable government.
One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.
However great his outward conformity, the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we properly demand of the immigrant even more than this. He must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment.
As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.
Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.
Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.
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