Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Interpretation
Life's significant events and changes often occur without our awareness or direct involvement.
This quote suggests that many important experiences, developments, and moments in a person's life happen when they are not actively present or involved. It highlights the idea that life continues to unfold and evolve beyond our immediate perceptions and actions, encouraging us to recognize the value and impact of everything that happens outside our direct focus.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, one might say this quote to highlight the unseen influences in our lives.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Memory is the basis of every journey.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
And what a congress of stinks!- Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks, Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
In the search for reality, energy creates its own discipline. But mere discipline, without full comprehension of all this, has no meaning, it is a most destructive thing.
What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
What a sublime idea of the infinite might of the great Architect, the Cause of all causes, the Father of all fathers, the Ens Entium! For if we would compare the Infinite, it would surely require a greater Infinite to cause the causes of effects than to produce the effects themselves.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.