Books are not life, only its ashes.
Marguerite YourcenarRead
nothing is slower than the true birth of a man
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the profound and often gradual journey of self-discovery and personal growth.
Marguerite Yourcenar's quote suggests that the process of truly understanding oneself and reaching one's potential is an intricate and time-consuming endeavor. It emphasizes that while external appearances or achievements may seem significant, true personal development is a deep, internal journey that requires time, patience, and introspection.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about personal growth and life's journey.
Books are not life, only its ashes.
Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. ... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.
Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.
The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.
When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is too complex.
Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey.
In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.
The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. Stretch it as thin as the temple flesh of an ailing woman and still it serves to ache the bone and to move the bone about; and in like manner the night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in a torment. We will find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire.
Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices...rather than to root them out.
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