"An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson"A fantastic book!
I've not read a real meaningful book as good as this in a long while... While I would not like to say too much about the book, (the book's too good to be reproduced in summary), I would like to share some of the quotes that I find most meaningful here...
Definitely brought enlightenment to me in some sense... just hoping I'll always keep them in mind...
How often have we felt like this? - "Shouldn't the world stop? Don't they know what has happened to me?"
Yet, how it should be - "I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life."
- " How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day."
When right perspective to death - "To know you're going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you're living"
- "Everyone knows they're going to die, but nobody belives it."
- "Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live."
- "Everyone knows someone who has died. Why is it so hard to think of dying?"
A lesson on Love - "Love each other or perish."
Sensible maturity - "Do not stop your lives. Otherwise this disease will have ruined three of us instead of one."
The beauty in Aging/ Dying - "As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it."
Why the wish to remain young? - "Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning. Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. you can't wait until sixty-five."
A lesson on our culture today - "People are only mean when they're threatened, and that's what our culture does. That's what our economy does. Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened, because they worry about losing them. And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself. You start making money a god."
Last but not least, a really nice story from the story...
"The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand time. He's enjoying the wind and the fresh air - until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore. 'My God, this is terrible,' the wave says. 'Look what's going to happen to me!' Then along came another wave. It sees the first wave looking grim, and it says to him, 'Why do you look so sad?' The first wave says, 'You don't understand! We're all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn't it terrible?' The second wave says, 'No, YOU don't understand. You're not a wave, you're part of the ocean.'"
