Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.
Interpretation
Alcohol leads to empty words, losing their significance once clarity returns.
This quote highlights the idea that words spoken while intoxicated lack depth and meaning, as they are often influenced by altered states of mind. Just as darkness dissipates with the dawn, so too do the fleeting sentiments expressed under the influence of alcohol vanish, revealing the hollow nature of such utterances.
In practice
During a discussion about the effects of alcohol, one might refer to this quote to emphasize how intoxication can lead to meaningless conversations.
Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.
What she said was always strange. It had happened long ago. It seemed insignificant. And yet it was something you remembered forever. The words as well as the story. The voice as much as the words.
I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.
Perhaps someone will have seen mine, the one I’m waiting for, just as I saw him, in a ditch when his hands were making their last appeal and his eyes no longer could see. Someone who will never know what that man was to me; someone whose name I’ll never know.
Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.
A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet; no one? am I quite sure?
In almost every case (where the United States has fought wars) our overwhelming commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights has required us to support those regimes that would deny freedom, democracy and human rights to their own people.
It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn’t see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.
To go from mortal to Buddha, you have to put an end to karma, nurture your awareness, and accept what life brings.
Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!
When we gaze at a star in the Milky Way which is 50,000 light-years away from our sun, we are looking back 50,000 years in time." "The idea is much too big for my little head." "The only way we can look out into space, then, is to look back in time. We can never know what the universe is like now. We only know what it was like then. When we look up at a star that is thousands of light-years away, we are really traveling thousands of years back in the history of space.
Never judge a philosophy by its abuse.
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