Vitality and beauty are gifts of Nature for those who live according to its laws.
Leonardo Da VinciRead
Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places.
Interpretation
Human beings dominate nature but often through violence and cruelty towards other living beings.
In this quote, Leonardo Da Vinci reflects on the darker aspects of humanity, suggesting that, unlike other animals, humans assert their dominance over the natural world through brutality. He implies that our very existence is tied to the suffering and death of other creatures, symbolizing a complex relationship where humans are both rulers and graveyards, inherently intertwined with the cycle of life and death.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture about ethics and morality in human behavior.
Vitality and beauty are gifts of Nature for those who live according to its laws.
Small rooms or dwellings set the mind in the right path, large ones cause it to go astray.
Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against the cold. For if you multiply your garments as the cold increases, that cold cannot hurt you; in the same way increase your patience under great offenses, and they cannot hurt your feelings.
The smallest feline is a masterpiece.
For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.
It is a far worthier thing to read by the light of experience than to adorn oneself with the labors of others.
So man's insanity is heaven's sense, and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
Every person born in this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique.
Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?
Are you then unable to recognize unless it has the same sound as yours?
How do we remain faithful to our own spiritual imagination and not betray what we know in our own bodies? The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.
What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?
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