Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
Robertson DaviesRead
What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
Interpretation
Luck is not random; it stems from our inner qualities and actions.
This quote by Robertson Davies suggests that what people often attribute to luck is actually a manifestation of their inner qualities, intentions, and actions. It implies that we have the power to create our circumstances through our mindset and efforts, rather than simply relying on chance or fate.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal empowerment and responsibility.
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
Pessimism is a very easy way out because it is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today, you can't help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of mankind.
This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries.
Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality.
The egotist is all surface; underneath is a pulpy mess and a lot of self-doubt. But the egoist may be yielding and even deferential in things he doesn't consider important; in anything that touches his core he is remorseless.
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.
Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'
There is no God, cry the masses more and more vociferously; and with the loss of God man loses his sense of values β is, as it were, massacred because he feels himself of no account.
Eventually I saw that the path of the heart requires a full gesture, a degree of abandon that can be terrifying. Only then is it possible to achieve a sparkling metamorphosis.
The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, God is under the porch as well as on top of the mountain, and joy is in both the front row and the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are.
Every morning our newspapers could read, 'More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty.' How? The poor die in hospital wards that lack drugs, in villages that lack antimalarial bed nets, in houses that lack safe drinking water. They die namelessly, without public comment. Sadly, sad stories rarely get written.
The freer that women become, the freer men will be. Because when you enslave someone, you are enslaved.
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