A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
Interpretation
Hatred can serve as a powerful motivator to confront and eliminate harmful ideologies or practices in life.
In this quote, Rebecca West suggests that the intensity of our hatred can illuminate the darker aspects of life, allowing us to identify and eliminate the false values and beliefs that society often imposes upon us. By embracing this strong emotion, we can gain clarity and make necessary changes that help us navigate through life's complexities with a critical eye.
In practice
In a speech addressing social injustice, one might quote this to emphasize the need to challenge accepted norms.
works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.
In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.
Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.
Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
There’s nothing wrong with not looking like something. It just means you don’t fit the stereotype yet.
To me spirituality needs an honest individuality. It does not allow any kind of dependence. It creates a freedom for itself, whatever the cost. It is never in the crowd but alone, because the crowd has never found any truth. The truth has been found only in people's aloneness.
Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveler; he Served human liberty.
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