Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
Mark TwainRead
What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one's self-approval.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that complex human emotions are influenced by a fundamental need for self-approval.
Mark Twain's quote reflects on the various aspects of human emotions such as love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, and forgiveness, proposing that they are all manifestations of a deeper impulse: the necessity for individuals to secure their own self-approval. This insight highlights how our actions and feelings are often driven by the desire for validation and acceptance from within ourselves, prompting us to examine the motivations behind our behaviors.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a discussion about the nature of human emotions at a philosophy club.
Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.
The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.
I don't think the world will destroy itself in a nuclear cataclysm. On the contrary, we have the capacity to save ourselves and save the planet, and we will use it.
Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.
Natural death is independent of all reason and is really an irrational death, in which the pitiable substance of the shell determines how long the kernel is to exist or not; in which, accordingly, the stunted, diseased and dull witted jailer is lord, and indicates the moment at which his distinguished prisoner shall die.
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