Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.
Interpretation
Acceptance involves acknowledging life's challenges without resigning to them.
This quote emphasizes the importance of acceptance in life, distinguishing it from resignation. Tournier suggests that acceptance is an active engagement with one's circumstances, including personal struggles and historical injustices, rather than a passive surrender to them. It encourages individuals to confront their realities and integrate them into their lives, cultivating resilience and understanding.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming adversity.
It is quite clear that between love and understanding there is a very close link...He who loves understands, and he who understands loves. One who feels understood feels loved, and one who feels loved feels sure of being understood.
That is what marriage really means; helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life.
What happens then is like what happens when we separate a jigsaw puzzle into its fuve hundred pieces: The over-all picture disappears. This is the state of modern medicine: It has lost the sense of the unity of man. Such is the price it has paid for its scientific progress. It has sacrificed art to science.
In order to really understand, we need to listen, not reply. We need to listen long and attentively. In order to help anybody to open his heart we have to give him time, asking only a few questions, as carefully as possible in order to help him better explain his experience.
The experience of being in between-between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bars and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, or extraordinary aliveness.
The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self justification and into his faults instead of freeing him from them. For him, our voice drowns the voice of God.
There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.
I dislike wealth and prosperity, especially that of other men.
And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually... it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, then life... every second of it... Is all we have.
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