A quotation from Robert Ingersoll

Life is a shadowy, strange, and winding road on which we travel for a little way — a few short steps — just from the cradle, with its lullaby of love, to the low and quiet way-side inn, where all at last must sleep, and where the only salutation is — Good-night.

Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) American lawyer, freethinker, orator
Essay (1881-11) “The Christian Religion,” “Part 2” North American Review, Vol. 133, No. 300

More about this quote: wist.info/ingersoll-robert-gre…

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Success

Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

~ Warren Buffett

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Which are necessary

Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this, the most important knowledge.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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The answer

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.

~ Jim Carrey

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Capability

Every person has within himself the capability to understand the life of all humanity. This capability is hidden deep in the soul, but it exists, and sooner or later, a person will find it.

~ Edward Carpenter

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Human existence

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

~ Bertrand Russel

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A quotation from Rilke

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the hardest of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
 
[Liebhaben von Mensch zu Mensch: das ist vielleicht das Schwerste, was uns aufgegeben ist, das Äußerste, die letzte Probe und Prüfung, die Arbeit, für die alle andere Arbeit nur Vorbereitung ist.]

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1963) German poet
Letter (1904-05-14) to Franz Xaver Kappus, Letters to a Young Poet [Briefe an einen jungen Dichter], No. 7 [tr. Norton (1934)]

More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/rilke-rainer-maria/3…

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Success

To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children […] to leave the world a bit better […] to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Perfection of character

Perfection of character: To live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretense.

~ Marcus Aurelius

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All that will be

Let me tell you, then, how you must think of me. I am as happy and lively as in my best days. Indeed, these days are my best, for my mind is now free of preoccupations and has leisure for its own concerns; now it amuses itself with lighter studies and now, pressing keenly after truth, it rises to the contemplation of its own nature and the nature of the universe. First it investigates the continents and their position, then the laws which govern the sea which surrounds them with its alternate ebb and flow, and then it examines the stretch which lies between heaven and earth and teems with such tumultuous and terrifying phenomena as thunder and lightning and gales and the precipitation of rain and snow and hail. Finally, when it has traversed the lower reaches, it bursts through to the realms above where it enjoys the fairest spectacle of things divine and, mindful of its eternity, moves freely among all that was and all that will be world without end.

~ Seneca, from Consolation of Helvia (20)

This type and period of writing is referred to as “silver point.” It’s highly polished, almost performance art in itself. Some pieces of silver point—including in my opinion swaths of Seneca’s writing—are tortuous to the language. (As I understand it, tortuous in the original as well as the English.)

What I’ve quoted is the ending of his letter. 2,000 years later, sounds to me like the human experience remains identical.

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