It's wonderful how, the moment you talk about God and love, your voice becomes hard, and your eyes fill with hatred. No, Margret, you certainly haven't the true faith.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the paradox of love and faith, suggesting that genuine belief shouldn't lead to intolerance or aggression.
August Strindberg's quote highlights the conflict that can arise between professed faith in God and the emotions of hatred and aggression that sometimes accompany discussions about love and spirituality. It challenges the notion that true faith should inspire kindness and compassion, rather than evoking hostility, indicating a disconnect between one's proclaimed beliefs and their emotional responses.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions or debates about the true nature of faith and its implications on human behavior.
Sorrow has the fortunate peculiarity that it preys upon itself. It dies of starvation. Since it is essentially an interruption of habits, it can be replaced by new habits. Constituting, as it does, a void, it is soon filled up by a real horror vacuum.
That is the thankless position of the father in the family - the provider for all, and the enemy of all.
Now I know the full power of evil. It makes ugliness seem beautiful and goodness seem ugly and weak.
I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.
On the much revered family of North American mythology - and a metaphor for the Ruling Alliance:_x000D_ _x000D_ Sacred family! .... The supposed home of all the virtues, where innocent children are tortured into their first falsehoods, where wills are broken by parental tyranny, and self-respect smothered by crowded, jostling egos.
Oh, I have loved him too much to feel no hate for him.
To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.
By all means continue destroying my possessions. I daresay I have too many.
The river flows at its own sweet will, but the flood is bound in the two banks. If it were not thus bound, its freedom would be wasted.
But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him.
The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.
No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.
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