You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.
Interpretation
Understanding lifeβs complexities requires experience and introspection.
This quote suggests that the questions we face in life often provide the key to understanding ourselves and the world around us. Until we encounter specific situations that challenge us or provoke thought, we remain unaware of the deeper truths and answers that lie within our experiences and thoughts.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion about existence and purpose.
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.
Try not to become disappointed if someone doesn't like a story you've written. Stick up for your ideas, but listen to what other people say, too. They might have good advice.
The sheep are happier of themselves, than under the care of wolves.
Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.
Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.
Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character.
Sometimes listening is of greater value than speaking.
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