That day, I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest impetus.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the fleeting nature of insights and the introspection that comes with confronting one's inner self.
Nicolas Bouvier's quote articulates the transient nature of personal realizations and how they can profoundly impact one's life, albeit temporarily. He suggests that while insights may initially change our perspective, they inevitably fade, leaving us to confront our own inherent feelings of inadequacy and existential questions. Embracing these challenges, rather than shying away from them, can serve as a powerful motivator for personal growth and understanding.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal development, mention this quote to highlight the importance of self-awareness.
Four things to think about. 1. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 2. Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred. 3. Keep three chairs in your house. One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. 4. To preserve your relationship to nature, make your life more moral, more pure, more innocent.
Unless we believe and see Jesus in the appearance of bread on the altar, we will not be able to see him in the distressing disguise of the poor.
All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge.
Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York — ’He was smiling. I stopped. ‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like— many years from now.
In the long run all battles are lost, and so are all wars.
We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea - organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation.
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