What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs company you love them.
Iris MurdochRead
As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the fragility of human life and our awareness of mortality.
Iris Murdoch's quote addresses the inherent instability and precariousness of human existence. It emphasizes the proximity of nonbeing, or death, and suggests that this awareness shapes our understanding of life and its fleeting moments. By acknowledging our fragility, we are invited to reflect on the meaningfulness of our experiences and the importance of living fully despite the uncertainty of life.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about appreciating life during tough times.
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs company you love them.
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Even when tied in a thousand knots, the string is still but one.
Law is nothing other than a certain ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by the person who has the care of the community.
And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
Not all thinking and all emotion are of the ego. They turn into ego only when you identify with them and they take you over completely, that is to say, when they become "I".
Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time - is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.
Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin.
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