As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow.
Interpretation
Our actions shape the future for generations to come.
This quote by Nikos Kazantzakis emphasizes the significance of our choices and actions over our lifetime, suggesting that the paths we create and the legacies we leave are what future generations will inherit. It reflects the idea that we are not merely living for ourselves but are also responsible for guiding and impacting the lives of those who follow us, much like how a riverbed directs the flow of water.
In practice
Use this quote during a graduation speech to inspire students to consider their impact.
A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.
This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.
What happiness this is: to fly, skimming over the earth just as we do in our dreams! Life has become a dream. Can this be the meaning of paradise?
I collect my tools: sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, intellect. Night has fallen.
The dual substance of Christ - the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God. [...] has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. [...] My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. [...] And my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.
I fight to embrace the entire circle of human activity to the full extent of my ability.
Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.
We must make good people wish that the Christian faith were true, and then show that it is.
Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger.
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Poverty is not just a sad accident, but it's also a result of the fact that some people make a lot of money off low-income families and directly contribute to their poverty.
A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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