What is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.
Daniel QuinnRead
You've been in love with someone for a decade - someone who barely knows you're alive. You've done everything, tried everything to make this person see that you're a valuable, estimable person, and that your love is worth something. Then one day you open the paper and glance at the Personals column, and there you see that your loved one has placed an ad... seeking someone worthwhile to love and be loved by.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the pain of unrequited love and the struggle for recognition from someone you deeply care for.
In this quote, Daniel Quinn captures the heart-wrenching experience of loving someone for a long time without having that love returned. It portrays the desperation and hopelessness of trying to gain the attention of a person who remains oblivious to your feelings, culminating in the painful realization when that person actively seeks love elsewhere, emphasizing the worthiness of love and the emotional turmoil of feeling unrecognized.
In practice
During a speech about the complexities of love at a relationship seminar.
What is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.
If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.
This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.
[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.
You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.
Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning? ...Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.
God does not love us because we are valuable. We are valuable because God loves us.
As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
I would step in the way of a bullet if it were aimed at my husband. It is not self-sacrifice to die protecting that which you value: If the value is great enough, you do not care to exist without it.
You have been walking the ocean's edge, holding up your robes to keep them dry. You must dive naked under and deeper under, a thousand times deeper. Love flows down. The ground submits to the sky and suffers what comes. Tell me, is the earth worse for giving in like that? Do not put blankets over the drum. Open completely.
The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.
We must love men, ere to us they will seem worthy of our love.
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