Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John KeatsRead
was it a vision or a waking dream? Fled is that music--do I wake or sleep?
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the nature of reality and perception, questioning whether experiences are genuine or illusory.
John Keats' quote contemplates the fine line between reality and illusion, suggesting that life experiences can sometimes feel dreamlike. It poses an existential question about whether we are truly awake to the world around us or merely dreaming, highlighting the often ambiguous nature of perception and existence.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the nature of reality in a philosophy class.
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
Are there not thousands in the world who love their fellows even to the death, who feel the giant agony of the world, and more, like slaves to poor humanity, labor for mortal good?
Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately, and do all you can to console me in it β make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me βwrite the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair.
Faded the flower and all its budded charms,Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise!Vanishd unseasonably
I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
...I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become more acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.
We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.
There's hostility to lying, and there should be.
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
A truth that is merely handed on, without being thought anew from its very foundations, has lost its vital power.
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