The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly.
Richard BachRead
Look in the mirror and one thing is sure: what we see is not who we are.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that our external appearance does not define our true selves.
Richard Bach's quote emphasizes the idea that the reflection we see in the mirror represents only our physical exterior and does not encompass the depth of our identity, thoughts, and experiences. It encourages self-reflection and understanding beyond superficial appearances, urging us to recognize and explore our inner selves.
In practice
During a personal development workshop, to illustrate self-acceptance.
The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull . . . was no ordinary bird. Most gulls don't bother_x000D_ _x000D_ to learn more than the simplest facts of flight how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this_x000D_ _x000D_ gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else,_x000D_ _x000D_ Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.
True love stories never have endings.
We wait all these years to find someone who understands us, I thought, someone who accepts us as we are, someone with a wizard's power to melt stone to sunlight, who can bring us happiness in spite of trials, who can face our dragons in the night, who can transform us into the soul we choose to be. Just yesterday I found that magical Someone is the face we see in the mirror: It's us and our homemade masks.
From time to time it's fun to close our eyes, and in that dark say to ourselves, 'I am the sorcerer, and when I open my eyes I shall see a world that I have created, and for which I and only I am completely responsible.' Slowly then, eyelids open like curtains lifting stage-center. And sure enough, there's our world, just the way we've built it.
If our body is a perfect expression of our thought about body, and if our thought about body is that itβs condition has everything to do with inner image and nothing to do with time, then we donβt have to be impatient for being too young or frightened of being too old.
I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.
I love the old way best, the simple way of poison, where we too are strong as men.
You bring me the deepest joy that can be felt by a man whose invincible belief is that Science and Peace will triumph over Ignorance and War, that nations will unite, not to destroy, but to build, and that the future will belong to those who will have done most for suffering humanity.
Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication. -Aunt Beast
Collectivism answers: The power of society is unlimited. Society may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes.
Progress without the reasoned freedom to think and act is regression to slavery.
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