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.
It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.
Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.
Outer beauty is inner beauty made visible, and it manifests itself in the light that flows in our eyes.
Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.
Sufis teach that we first must battle and destroy the evil within ourselves by shining upon it the good within, and then we learn to battle the evil in others by helping their higher selves gain control of their lower selves.
Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.
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