If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
John UpdikeRead
Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life is similar to a video game where despite our achievements, mortality is inevitable.
In this quote, John Updike expresses the idea that life, akin to a video game, is filled with challenges and opportunities for skill development. However, regardless of how accomplished one becomes, the finality of life—represented by being 'zapped'—reminds us of our mortality and the transient nature of existence.
Themes
LifeVideo GameMortalityChallengesExistence
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about embracing challenges in life.
More from John Updike
All quotes →Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. _x000D_ _x000D_ Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
John UpdikeRead
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John UpdikeRead
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
John UpdikeRead
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
John UpdikeRead
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
John UpdikeRead
Similar quotes
Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.
Stephen LevineRead
Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.
Michael ShermerRead
I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Read
Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships.
Ayn RandRead
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
The definition of morality: Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life - and being successful.
Friedrich NietzscheRead