Go forward with joyful confidence.
George EliotRead
No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.
Interpretation
Human connections provide purpose and emotional fulfillment.
This quote by George Eliot emphasizes the importance of meaningful relationships in our lives. It suggests that a person's sense of worth and emotional wellbeing is deeply tied to their ability to trust and admire others. The presence of even one significant connection can prevent feelings of isolation and despair, highlighting the vital role that relationships play in the human experience.
In practice
During a speech about mental health, you can use this quote to emphasize the importance of human connection.
Go forward with joyful confidence.
You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well.
She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel β that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth.
Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.
You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?
Instead of building walls, we should be building bridges.
To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.
Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.
If we stop believing in a future, if we stop doing things for something else but start doing them for now, some fundamental things change. Retirement becomes less about how much money you can squirrel away now and much more a matter of participating and contributing to your own community now so that they want to take care of you. β¦ Weβre going to move into a world where your retirement will be more secure if youβve made lots of friends with young people rather than collected lots of dollars.
In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.
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