Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.
Interpretation
Letting go and exploring new experiences are essential to avoid stagnation in life.
This quote emphasizes the necessity of saying goodbye to familiar comforts in order to embrace new opportunities and experiences. It warns that clinging to what we love without seeking growth and change can lead to a gradual decline of the self, ultimately resulting in a loss of vitality and purpose.
In practice
During a graduation speech, to encourage students to embrace change as they step into the future.
I had given up ( around 1950, fh) any ambition of making a career as an artist…..I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.
The things we truly love, the things forming the basis and roots of our being, are generally things we never look at. A huge piece of carpeting, empty and naked plains, silent and uninterrupted stretches with nothing to alter the homogeneity of their continuity. I love wide, homogenous worlds, unstaked, unlimited like the sea, like high snows, deserts, and steppes.
In the name of what - except perhaps the coefficient of rarity - does man adorn himself with necklaces of shells and not spider's webs, with fox fur and not fox innards? In the name of what I don't know. Don't dirt, trash and filth, which are man's companions during his whole lifetime, deserve to be dearer to him and isn't it serving him well to remind him of their beauty?
Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.
Much as we may wish to make a new beginning, some part of us resists doing so as though we were making the first step toward disaster.
Empowering women isn’t just the right thing to do - it’s the smart thing to do.
I represent a party which does not yet exist: the party Revolution-Civilization. This party will make the twentieth century. There will issue from it first the United States of Europe, then the United States of the World.
Let's work together to make our economies strong and our climate sustainable. It can be done.
For the timid, change is frightening; for the comfortable, change is threatening; but for the confident, change is opportunity.
Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.
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