Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.
Emile ZolaRead
I defy you to find any real will, any reasoning force, outside of life. And everything is there; there is, in the world, no other will than this force which impels everything to life, a life even broader and higher.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that true will and reasoning are intrinsically tied to life itself.
Emile Zola conveys that the driving force behind all existence and reason stems from the essence of life. He suggests that beyond the vitality that permeates living beings, no other external force can truly embody will or reasoning; rather, they are inherently linked to the broader and higher dimensions of life itself.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a philosophical discussion about the nature of existence.
Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.
I believe that all is illusion and vanity outside the treasure of truths slowly accumulated, and which will never again be lost. I believe that the sum of these truths, always increasing, will at last confer on man incalculable power and peace, if not happiness. Yes, I believe in the final triumph of life.
A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to lie rotting on the ground.
Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!
Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?
They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.
The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.
I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.
The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now.
Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one.
I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.
If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.
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