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It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.
Gertrude Stein
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Hope can sometimes blind us to reality, leading us to dangerous choices.

Gertrude Stein's quote suggests that while hope is a natural and comforting feeling, it can also mislead us. We often ignore the warning signs of potential pitfalls, allowing ourselves to be drawn into destructive situations by an enticing but ultimately harmful illusion of hope.

Themes

HopeIllusionRealityDangerAwareness

In practice

Example use cases

A motivational speaker addressing the risks of blind optimism in personal development.

More from Gertrude Stein

. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.
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The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.
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If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.
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The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
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I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.
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Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.
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