Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
The world you live in is not a given; much of what is best in it has been built through the struggles of passionate activists over the last centuries. They won us many freedoms and protected many beauties. Count those gifts among your growing heap.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The world around us is shaped by the efforts of dedicated activists who fought for freedom and beauty.
Rebecca Solnit emphasizes that the reality we experience today is not a product of chance; rather, it is the result of the hard work and struggles of passionate activists who have fought over centuries to secure freedoms and preserve the beauty of the world. We should recognize and appreciate these contributions as valuable gifts that enrich our lives and inspire us to continue the work of progress.
Themes
ActivismChangeFreedomAppreciationStruggle
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech at a rally to inspire activists to appreciate their predecessors.
More from Rebecca Solnit
All quotes βI still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
Rebecca SolnitRead
We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
Rebecca SolnitRead
If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
Rebecca SolnitRead
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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