Tears throw a veil over our faults and allow us to accuse fate without fear or contradiction.
Italo SvevoRead
Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the relationship between personal vices and self-perception of greatness.
Italo Svevo explores the idea that one’s doubts and flaws might be essential to their identity and strength. The speaker ponders whether giving up smoking would have prevented the development of their character, suggesting that sometimes our struggles and vices contribute to our sense of who we are and how we perceive our potential for greatness.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming challenges and self-doubt.
Tears throw a veil over our faults and allow us to accuse fate without fear or contradiction.
You see things less clearly when you open your eyes too wide.
The fancies of wine are authentic events.
Everyone remembers his past with greater vividness as the present becomes more important. Dying men in their last delirium are supposed to see their whole life spread out before them.
Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.
To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.
Worshiping someone means...placing that person outside of our world. We are not worshiping anyone or anything, we are simply communing with Creation.
And I have the others in me. Even when I’m far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I’m all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself.
It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?
Holy solitaries' is a phrase no more consistent with the Gospel than holy adulterers. The Gospel of Christ knows no religion but social; no holiness, but social holiness.
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