Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.
Michael OndaatjeRead
When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.
Interpretation
What this quote means
As we age, we become increasingly concerned with our legacy and how we are perceived by others.
Michael Ondaatje's quote reflects on the human tendency to care about our identity and legacy as we grow older. In youth, we often live in the moment and do not scrutinize our reflections, but as we age, we become preoccupied with how we will be remembered and how our accomplishments define us, leading to an obsession with reputation, pride, and self-image, akin to Narcissus's need for recognition.
Themes
LegacyIdentityAgingReflectionVanity
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on personal growth, this quote can emphasize the importance of understanding our past to shape our future.
More from Michael Ondaatje
All quotes βWater is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
Michael OndaatjeRead
You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
Michael OndaatjeRead
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
Michael OndaatjeRead
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
Michael OndaatjeRead
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
Michael OndaatjeRead
Similar quotes
The environment you fashion out of your thoughts, your beliefs, your ideals, your philosophy is the only climate you will ever live in. The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.
Stephen CoveyRead
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
Oscar WildeRead
There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.
Christian WimanRead
In a fully free society, taxation-or, to be exact, payment for governmental services-would be voluntary.
Ayn RandRead
To Mercy Pity Peace and Love All pray in their distress, And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness. For Mercy Pity Peace and Love Is God our father dear. And Mercy Pity Peace and Love Is Man his child and care. Then every man of every clime That prays in his distress Prays to the human form divine: Love Mercy Pity Peace. And all must love the human form In heathen, Turk, or Jew. Where Mercy, Love and Pity dwell There God is dwelling too.
William BlakeRead
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
George SantayanaRead