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.
What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?
What's the difference between the Lone Ranger and God? There really is a Lone Ranger.
Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
Sincerity is the same in a corner alone, as it is before the face of the world. It knows not how to wear two vizards, one for an appearance before men, and another for a short snatch in a corner; but it must have God, and be with him in the duty of prayer. It is not lip-labour that it doth regard, for it is the heart that God looks at, and that which sincerity looks at, and that which prayer comes from, if it be that prayer which is accompanied with sincerity.
I believe in goodness, mercy and charity. I believe in casting bread upon the waters.
Man is born an asocial and antisocial being. The newborn child is a savage. Egoism is his nature. Only the experience of life and the teachings of his parents, his brothers, sisters, playmates, and later of other people FORCE HIM to acknowledge the advantages of social cooperation and accordingly to change his behavior.
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