A Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our life seems not present, so much as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast- flowingvigor.
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Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning.
A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example.
The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.
However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.
Tell the truth. All the time. About everything. What's the alternative to radical honesty? Waste. Wasted time, wasted money, wasted possibilities-a wasted life.
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.
The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.
As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God.
All of the pleasures of this present physical life can be continued into the next life as well, since we will have a body which is similar to our present physical body, but so much more glorious and wonderful and supernatural. We will be able to eat, drink, be merry and have fun without ever suffering pain or sickness or weariness or death.
For some, the fear of coming out is so great, they can continue to live an inauthentic life. But at a certain point, the pain becomes too much to bear. For me, having one more day pass by where I wasn't living my true self seemed like such a wasted opportunity, such a wasted life.
How much of our literature, our political life, our friendships and love affairs, depend on being able to talk peacefully in a bar!
The present generation finds itself the heir of a vast patrimony of science; and it must needs concern us to know the steps by which these possessions were acquired, and the documents by which they are secured to us and our heirs for ever.
The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practicedby every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.
Compassion is the basis of all truthful relationship: it means being present with love-for ourselves and for all life, including animals, fish, birds, and trees. Compassion is bringing our deepest truth into our actions, no matter how much the world seems to resist, because that is ultimately what we have to give this world and one another.
The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it....we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.
I think what we're attracted to on the page is something that is very difficult to do in life, which is to examine in what seems like a moment. To examine what we can't do in life very well, which is to be as present and accountable to what an experience is. That's why life is short and art is very long.
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