Great Love Always Exacts a Great Cost

answered by Laozi, "Dao De Jing", Ch. 44

기원전 6~4세기

🎬 TODAY'S FILM — IT ASKS THIS

Citizen Kane (1941)

dir. Orson Welles · USA

A man who built a vast media empire and seemed to have everything the world could offer dies alone and forgotten. His final word points to something entirely different from everything he spent a lifetime accumulating.

THE QUESTION THE FILM ASKS

Why does a man who has everything still long for one small, lost freedom?

THE CLASSIC'S ANSWER · ORIGINAL

甚愛必大費，多藏必厚亡。

📜 THE CLASSIC'S ANSWER

Great love always exacts a great cost; great hoarding always ends in great loss.

💡 TL;DR

Laozi said that the more one hoards, the greater the loss that follows.

📝The Classic Answers

Laozi said that the more one hoards, the greater the loss that follows. A man who built a newspaper empire and held nearly everything the world had to offer, at the moment of his death, called out not the name of his fortune or his power, but the name of a lost childhood sled. Everything he spent a lifetime accumulating could never replace the one small freedom he truly longed for. Before this paradox, where wealth and power piled higher only make what was lost more vivid, I ask myself whether what I am accumulating right now is truly filling me.

— ONGO · Curator

🌱Apply It Today

If you are accumulating something today, ask once whether that accumulation is truly filling you, or costing you something.

📖 Classic Source: Laozi, "Dao De Jing", Ch. 44. Ancient text in the public domain; rendered and interpreted independently by ONGO.
The film is honored as an equal questioner; its plot is rendered only as a universal dilemma. The classic source is an ancient text (Public Domain), and the reflection is 100% original ONGO content.