Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.
Interpretation
This quote reflects a desire to avoid confronting one's thoughts and the chaos they may bring.
Emile Zola's quote suggests that sometimes it is better to avoid introspection and the potential turmoil that can arise from examining our thoughts. The act of blowing out the candle symbolizes a desire to remain in the dark rather than face the illuminated complexities and harsh realities of one's own mind.
In practice
During a meditation retreat, someone might use this quote to explain the struggle with their inner thoughts.
I believe that all is illusion and vanity outside the treasure of truths slowly accumulated, and which will never again be lost. I believe that the sum of these truths, always increasing, will at last confer on man incalculable power and peace, if not happiness. Yes, I believe in the final triumph of life.
A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to lie rotting on the ground.
Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!
Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?
They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.
If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.
When we hold to the core, the opposite sides are the same if they are seen from the center of the moving circle. I do not experience; I am experience. I am not the subject of experience; I am that experience. I am awareness. Nothing else can be I or can exist.
I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the first sentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now as guilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It's a terrible burden to carry. All sentient life is sacred.
Perception is a mirror not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.
Here, then, is what I wanted to tell you of my architecture. I created it with courage and idealism, but also with an awareness of the fact that what is important is life, friends and attempting to make this unjust world a better place in which to live.
I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.
Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.