Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.
Ivan TurgenevRead
To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
Interpretation
True holiness comes from selflessness and empathy toward others.
This quote highlights the essence of genuine holiness as the ability to let go of personal desires and expectations while fostering deep compassion for others. Turgenev suggests that true virtue lies in selflessness and emotional connection with those around us, indicating that holiness is not about strict adherence to rituals but about how we relate to and care for others.
In practice
In a speech about charity work, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of selfless giving.
Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.
So many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me - a long, long road without a goal.
If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.
Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!
Death's an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.
I walked in the meadows of green grieving for my life.
Think of our physical sustenance. It is truly heaven-sent. The necessities of air, food, and water all come to us as gifts from a loving Heavenly Father.
We look at life from the back side of the tapestry. And most of the time, what we see is loose threads, tangled knots and the like. But occasionally, God's light shines through the tapestry, and we get a glimpse of the larger design with God weaving together the darks and lights of existence.
In the poor and outcast we see Christ’s face; by loving and helping the poor, we love and serve Christ.
Yet seldom do they fail of their seed, And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us.
When Levin thought what he was and what he was living for, he could find no answer to the questions and was reduced to despair; but when he left off questioning himself about it, it seemed as though he knew both what he was and what he was living for, acting and living resolutely and without hesitation.
Many have become chess masters - no one has become the master of chess.
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