Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John KeatsRead
Some say the world is a vale of tears, I say it is a place of soul-making.
Interpretation
The quote contrasts the notion of life as suffering with the idea of life as a process of growth and development.
John Keats suggests that while some view the world as a painful and sorrowful experience, he perceives it as a valuable opportunity for personal and spiritual development. This perspective highlights the transformative power of life's challenges, depicting them as essential for nurturing the soul.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming hardships, this quote could highlight the positive outcomes of facing challenges.
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.
This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.
Spiritual life can certainly follow the pattern one sees in the fake martial arts, with most teachers making nebulous and magical claims that never get tested, while their students derange themselves with weird ideas, empty rituals, and other affectations.
America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.
The law of the Creator, which invests every human being with an inalienable title to freedom, cannot be repealed by any interior law which asserts that man is property.
The only standard we have for judging all of our social, economic, and political institutions and arrangements as just or unjust, as good or bad, as better or worse, derives from our conception of the good life for man on earth, and from our conviction that, given certain external conditions, it is possible for men to make good lives for themselves by their own efforts.
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