A Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The duration of our passions is no more dependent on ourselves than the duration of our lives.
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Without dignity our lives are only blinks of duration. But if we manage to lead a good life well, we create something more. We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.
The Lord said: 'Without Me you can do nothing' (Jn. 15:5). So for the duration of our life, every day and at every moment, we must keep unchanged in our heart the feeling, conviction and disposition, that on no occasion can we allow ourselves to think of relying on ourselves and trusting ourselves.
We need strength beyond ourselves to keep the commandments in whatever circumstance life brings to us. The combination of trials and their duration are as varied as are the children of our Heavenly Father. No two are alike. But what is being tested is the same, at all times in our lives and for every person: will we do whatsoever the Lord our God will command us?
Among other things I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit. So here we are several billion of us, crowded into our global concentration camp for the duration. How are we to survive? Solemnity is not the answer, any more than witless and irresponsible frivolity is. I think our best chance lies in humor, which in this case means a wry acceptance of our predicament. We don't have to like it but we can at least recognize its ridiculous aspects, one of which is ourselves.
While nothing is more uncertain than a single life, nothing is more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives.
We [people] have a teacher! The teacher is ourselves! We already know everything we need to know - our challenge is to discover that we know it. Turning to gurus, I think, we become guru-dependent, no different from drug-dependent, alcohol-dependent - needing an outside force to control our lives.
The opinions of men should not be the object of any government. Our civil rights are no more dependent on our religious beliefs than they are dependent upon our thoughts about geometry or physics!
To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our belief.
Our true dignity consists — in thought. Thence we must derive our elevation, not from space or duration. Let us endeavor then to think well; this is the principle of morals.
Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.
The perception of duration itself presupposes a duration of perception.
When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.
The only control we have over the duration of our life is to shorten it, and we do that all the time.
Geological age plays the same part in our views of the duration of the universe as the Earth's orbital radius does in our views of the immensity of space.
The more we make our lives about us, then the more we waste our time. When we get older, we devote our lives to ourselves, and then we wasted it. If we want to devote our lives to something significant, something that matters, then we should devote our lives to the Lord Jesus.
Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!
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