Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
Tony JudtRead
Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.
Interpretation
Words have the power to help us understand and gain control over difficult emotions.
In this quote, Tony Judt expresses the idea that by articulating our experiences and emotions through words, we can better comprehend and manage challenging situations, such as illness. Rather than letting illness define us or overwhelm us emotionally, we can use language as a tool to create distance and mastery over our feelings, transforming them into something we can discuss and reflect upon thoughtfully.
In practice
In a speech about mental health, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of expressing feelings.
Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.
If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants
Obviously a primary liberal conviction is that we should be tolerant of other peoples' convictions. But if we believe in something, we had better find ways to say so convincingly.
Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.
What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.
I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky.
Remembrance is a form of meeting.
If there is only empty space, with no suns nor planets in it, then space loses its substantiality.
Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
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