Content
This popular text describes a dream, in which the person is walking on a beach with God. They leave two sets of footprints in the sand behind them. Looking back, the tracks are stated to represent various stages of this person's life. At some points the two trails dwindle to one, especially at the lowest and most hopeless moments of the character's life. When questioning God, believing that God must have abandoned his follower during those times, God gives the explanation: "During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you."
Read more about this topic: Footprints (poem)
Famous quotes containing the word content:
“Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light,—to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success! But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A rake is a composition of all the lowest, most ignoble, degrading, and shameful vices; they all conspire to disgrace his character, and to ruin his fortune; while wine and the pox content which shall soonest and most effectually destroy his constitution.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Now they express
All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,
All actions done in patient hopelessness,
All that ignores the silences of death,
Thinking no further than the hand can hold,
All that grows old,
Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)