The art of healing is like an unroofed temple, uncovered at the top and cracked at the foundation.
Interpretation
Healing is a complex and imperfect process, much like a flawed structure.
Benjamin Rush's quote emphasizes the intricate and often precarious nature of healing, suggesting that it is not a straightforward endeavor, but rather one that involves great vulnerability and foundational issues. Just as an unroofed temple is exposed and incomplete, healing requires openness and acknowledgment of underlying cracks or pain before true restoration can occur.
In practice
In a speech about mental health awareness, one might use this quote to illustrate the challenges of healing.
...This large and expensive stock of drugs will be unnecessary. By...doses of...medicines...multiplying...combining them properly, 20 to 30 articles, aided by the common resources of the lancet, a garden, a kitchen, fresh air, cool water, exercise, will be sufficient to cure all the diseases that are at present under the power of medicine.
The Bible, when not read in schools, is seldom read in any subsequent period of life...The Bible...should be read in our schools in preference to all other books because it contains the greatest portion of that kind of knowledge which is calculated to produce private and public happiness.
The gospel of Jesus Christ prescribes the wisest rules for just conduct in every situation in life. Happy they who are enabled to obey them in all situations!
Dissections daily convince us of our ignorance of the seats of diseases, and cause us to blush at our prescriptions. How often are we disappointed in our expectation from the most certain and powerful of our remedies, by the negligence or obstinacy of our patients! What mischief have we done under the belief of false facts and false theories! We have assisted in multiplying diseases. We have done more β we have increased their mortality.
Temperate, sincere, and intelligent inquiry and discussion are only to be dreaded by the advocates of error. The truth need not fear them.
[W]here there is no law, there is no liberty; and nothing deserves the name of law but that which is certain and universal in its operation upon all the members of the community.
Master technique, so that technique NEVER prevents you from dancing.
We attempted perfection; we wanted an object to be without flaw, so we cut the papers with a razor, pasted them down meticulously, but it buckled and was ruined... that is why we decided to tear prewrinkled paper, so that in the finished work of art imperfection would be an integral part, as if at birth death were built in.
Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.
When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end.
We were just amazed we were putting out a record. We were, and are, still learning. But we've never cared much for professionalism as long as the energy was there. Like our live shows: We're out of tune and use a lot of feedback. That's not on purpose or because we don't care, we're just musically and rhythmically retarded and we play so hard that we can't tune our guitars fast enough.
People are fond of using military terms to describe what they do. We call it bombing when we go out painting, when of course it's more like entertaining the troops in a neutral zone, during peacetime in a country without an army.
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