There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
T. S. EliotRead
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the struggle of exerting willpower to face pivotal moments in life.
In this quote, T. S. Eliot contemplates the tension between indulgence and the necessity of confronting significant turning points in life. It suggests an internal struggle where one must muster the strength to act decisively in crucial moments, even after enjoying life's pleasures like tea and cakes.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about embracing life's challenges.
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
For I have known them all already, known them all— Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.
The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by the citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of ‘peace of mind,’ the mindless peace of complacency.
It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.
I think a person has to believe in something,_x000D_ or search out some kind of faith;_x000D_ otherwise life is empty, nothing._x000D_ How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly,_x000D_ why children are born, why there are stars in the sky..._x000D_ Either you know why you live,_x000D_ or it's all small, unnecessary bits.
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