And if you can't shape your life the way you want, at least try as much as you can not to degrade it.
Interpretation
Strive to improve your life even if you can't control everything.
This quote by C.P. Cavafy emphasizes the importance of taking responsibility for our lives. While we may not have full control over our circumstances, we should actively strive to avoid negative actions that would degrade our quality of life, suggesting that maintaining integrity and a sense of purpose is essential.
In practice
In a motivational talk about personal development.
Give me artificial flowers - porcelain and metal glories - neither fading nor decaying, forms unaging. Flowers of the splendid gardens of another place, where Forms and Styles and Knowledge dwell. I love flowers made of glass or gold, true Art's true gifts, their painted hues more beautiful than nature's, worked in nacre and enamel, with perfect leaves and branches.
When you set out on your journey to Ithaca, pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge.
Don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now, work gone wrong, your plans all proving deceptive — don’t mourn them uselessly. As one long prepared, and graced with courage, say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving. Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say it was a dream, your ears deceived you: don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
To certain people there comes a day when they must say the great Yes or the great No.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you. Wise as you have become, with so much experience, you must already have understood what these Ithacas mean.
I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.
Every day, we at the United Nations see the human toll of an absence of regulations or lax controls on the arms trade. We see it in the suffering of civilian populations trapped by armed conflict or pervasive crime. We see it in the killing and wounding of civilians - including children, the most vulnerable of all.
We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny . . . I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.
Justified or not, the Supreme Court has a kind of sacred status in American life. For whatever reason, Presidents can safely run against Congress, and vice versa, but I think there is an inherent popular aversion to assaults on the court itself. Perhaps it has to do with an instinctive belief that life needs umpires.
So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.