Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
Interpretation
Imagination plays a crucial role in shaping our reality and experiences.
This quote by Simone Weil emphasizes the significant influence that imagination and fiction have on our day-to-day lives, suggesting that our perceptions, dreams, and interpretations of reality are heavily colored by our creative thinking and storytelling. It implies that much of what we consider 'real' is constructed by our imaginative capacities, highlighting the importance of creativity in understanding and experiencing life.
In practice
In a motivational speech, to encourage creativity in problem-solving.
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
For life is but a dream whose shapes return, some frequently, some seldom, some by night and some by day.
In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.
We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans became almost a planetary disease organism. But it has taken [Earth] 2.5 billion years to evolve an animal that can think and communicate its thoughts. If we become extinct she has little chance of evolving another.
If I got rid of my demons, Iβd lose my angels.
We must make good people wish that the Christian faith were true, and then show that it is.
I have spent a lot of my career working on normative political philosophy, developing the 'capabilities approach' to social justice. I have also spent a lot of my career working on the structure of the emotions, and their role in human life.
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