Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.
Interpretation
Embracing variety in life helps prevent boredom and dissatisfaction.
This quote by Petrarch emphasizes the importance of variety in our lives, suggesting that without it, we can become discontented and repulsed by monotony. It highlights how diversity and change can rejuvenate our experiences, encouraging us to seek out new and different things to foster joy and prevent a sense of disgust with the ordinary.
In practice
In a motivational speech to encourage creativity in the workplace.
Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.
Five enemies of peace inhabit with us - avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.
Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.
To begin with myself, then, the utterances of men concerning me will differ widely, since in passing judgment almost every one is influenced not so much by truth as by preference, and good and evil report alike know no bounds.
True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.
I looked back at the summit of the mountain, which seemed but a cubit high in comparison with the height of human contemplation, were in not too often merged in the corruptions of the earth.
The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.
The average is that which no person quite ever is.
I am in no way different from anyone else, that my predicament, my sense of aloneness or isolation may be precisely what unites me with everyone.
It is unacceptable that more than 1 billion people are hungry every day while another billion are obese.
he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular
The whole principle (censorship) is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.