The fool’s life is empty of gratitude and full of fears; its course lies wholly toward the future.
EpicurusRead
The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that many people prepare for life endlessly without ever truly living it.
Epicurus highlights a common human tendency to procrastinate living fully, caught up in the preparations and plans instead of embracing the present moment. The fool, despite his many flaws, exemplifies this behavior by continuously getting ready for life rather than experiencing it, prompting us to reflect on our own actions and priorities regarding how we choose to engage with life.
In practice
In a motivational speech encouraging others to take risks and seize the day.
The fool’s life is empty of gratitude and full of fears; its course lies wholly toward the future.
Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live.
The wise man who has become accustomed to necessities knows better how to share with others than how to take from them, so great a treasure of self-sufficiency has he found.
We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink.
I was not, I was, I am not, I care not. (Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo)
Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.
There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
We must give up the vain idea of trying to please everybody. That is impossible, and the attempt is a mere waste of time. We must be content to walk in Christ's steps, and let the world say what it likes.
You don’t question Providence. If you can’t have the reality, a dream is just as good.
So the Dark did a simple thing. They showed the maker of the sword his own uncertainty and fear. Fear of having done the wrong thing--fear that having done this one great thing, he would never again be able to accomplish anything of great worth--fear of age, of insufficiency, of unmet promise. All such great fears, that are the doom of people given the gift of making, and lie always somewhere in their minds.
I made an oath to myself: as long as I live as long as my soul remains in this body I won't deviate from the right way but later I looked to my left and then to my right and I saw our beloved everywhere how could I make a wrong turn?
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