To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
Interpretation
Understanding a single person's existence requires a deep, all-encompassing view of the world.
In this quote, Salman Rushdie emphasizes the complexity of human life and the necessity of absorbing vast experiences to truly comprehend an individual's journey. The metaphor of 'swallowing the world' suggests that to grasp one person's reality, you must consider the multitude of factors and influences that shape it, highlighting the interconnectedness of all lives and experiences.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about empathy and understanding others.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Some formulas are too complex and I don't want anything to do with them.
The Buddha is not a person but a (state of) realization to which anyone can attain.
My spiritual pain is unbearable. I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people's lives, then can it be that I a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?
I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I donβt want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta. No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there.
War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.
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