Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.
Emile ZolaRead
People like comfort; that's natural. But as for making money simply for the sake of making it, and giving yourself far more trouble and anxiety to gain it than you can ever get pleasure from it when it's gained, why, as for me, I'd rather sit still and cross my arms.
Interpretation
Comfort is natural, but the pursuit of money for its own sake can lead to unnecessary stress.
In this quote, Emile Zola emphasizes the inherent human desire for comfort and safety. He critiques the relentless pursuit of wealth, suggesting that the anxiety and trouble one might endure in seeking money outweighs the joy that money can bring once acquired. Zola advocates for a more balanced approach to life, favoring contentment and stillness over the relentless chase for material gain.
In practice
In a discussion about work-life balance, this quote serves as a reminder to prioritize mental well-being over financial gain.
Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.
I believe that all is illusion and vanity outside the treasure of truths slowly accumulated, and which will never again be lost. I believe that the sum of these truths, always increasing, will at last confer on man incalculable power and peace, if not happiness. Yes, I believe in the final triumph of life.
A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to lie rotting on the ground.
Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!
Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?
They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.
In the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature.
The end of the First World War had thrown Germany's youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger ones drew together in larger and smaller groups to blaze new paths or, at least, to discover a new star to steer by.
The universe (he said) offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain — although it may think it can — the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.
The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.
Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon
Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.
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