Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.
Ivan TurgenevRead
To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
Interpretation
True holiness comes from selflessness and empathy toward others.
This quote highlights the essence of genuine holiness as the ability to let go of personal desires and expectations while fostering deep compassion for others. Turgenev suggests that true virtue lies in selflessness and emotional connection with those around us, indicating that holiness is not about strict adherence to rituals but about how we relate to and care for others.
In practice
In a speech about charity work, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of selfless giving.
Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.
So many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me - a long, long road without a goal.
If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.
Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!
Death's an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.
I walked in the meadows of green grieving for my life.
There's enough food in this world. There's enough housing in this world. There's enough shelter in this world. There's enough clothing in this world. There's enough teachers, there's enough universities for everybody's needs to be met, and the reasons they aren't is not because of lack of resources. It's because of distribution, and that's the politics of hate, which is why this is a movement against that. It's a politics of love.
the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.
she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off. The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice.
I feel kind of depressed today... Do you ever have the feeling that life has passed you by? Worse than that... Sometimes I think life and I are going in opposite directions!
Go anywhere in England where there are natural wholesome, contented and really nice English people; and what do you find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.
When you demand nothing of the world, nor of God, when you want nothing, seek nothing, expect nothing, then the supreme state will come to you uninvited and unexpected.
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