Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
H. G. WellsRead
Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.
Interpretation
Losing one's direction is unfortunate, but losing the purpose of the journey is much worse.
This quote by H. G. Wells highlights the importance of understanding and maintaining the core purpose behind our journeys in life. While straying off the path can be a setback, the real tragedy lies in forgetting why we embarked on that path in the first place, as purpose gives meaning to our experiences and aspirations.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a motivational speech about finding purpose in life.
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions... Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphis sweat and struggle; the
It [a new world order] needs only that the governments of Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and Russia should get together in order to set up an effective control of currency, credit, production, and distribution – that is to say, an effective ‘dictatorship of prosperity,’ for the whole world. The other sixty odd States would have to join in or accommodate themselves to the over-ruling decisions of these major Powers.
Things that would have made fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.
But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours - that's another matter.
The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast - is choice.
For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.
A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche's message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
If you knew what I know about the power of giving, you would not let a single meal pass without sharing it in some way.
Where there is no strife there is decay: 'The mixture which is not shaken decomposes.'
In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, ... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and ... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac.
Things said or done long years ago Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.