“To be alive at all is
to have scars."
- John Steinbeck,
born on this day in 1902.
“To be alive at all is to have scars." - John Steinbeck, born on this day in 1902.
Seneca supplied him with one of his favorite epigrams: “Death weighs on him who is known to all, but dies unknown to himself.”
James Miller • Examined Lives
“I may wish to be free from torture, but if the time comes for me to endure it, I’ll wish to bear it courageously with bravery and honor. Wouldn’t I prefer not to fall into war? But if war does befall me, I’ll wish to carry nobly the wounds, starvation, and other necessities of war. Neither am I so crazy as to desire illness, but if I must suffer i
... See moreStephen Hanselman • The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
“It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others.”
Suzanne Koven • Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life
We can deny the past, but we can’t escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.
Gregory David Roberts • Shantaram: A Novel
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books (Dostoevsky and Dickens) that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves c... See more
“To be alive at all is to have scars.”
— John Steinbeck
— John Steinbeck
Author Norman Mailer once said, “Every moment of one’s existence, one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.”
Michael Thompson • The Heart of a Warrior
Happy the man, and happy he alone, He, who can call to-day his own: He who, secure within, can say: “To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have liv’d to-day.” Those words sound modern, don’t they? Yet they were written thirty years before Christ was born, by the Roman poet Horace.