Constant dripping hollows out a stone.
Interpretation
Persistence and consistency can lead to significant change over time.
This quote highlights the power of persistence and the idea that steady, continuous effort can achieve remarkable results, even in seemingly insurmountable challenges. Just as water can gradually wear away stone with its incessant dripping, so can our persistent actions over time shape our lives and the world around us.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
Huts they made then, and fire, and skins for clothing, And a woman yielded to one man in wedlock... ... Common, to see the offspring they had made; The human race began to mellow then. Because of fire their shivering forms no longer Could bear the cold beneath the covering sky.
No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings - the things thus grow Until we know them and name them. By degrees They melt, and are no more the things we know.
What is food to one man is bitter poison to others.
The water hollows out the stone, not by force but drop by drop.
Thus the sum of things is ever being reviewed, and mortals dependent one upon another. Some nations increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners pass on the torch of life.
Many animals even now spring out of the soil, Coalescing from the rains and the heat of the sun. Small wonder, then, if more and bigger creatures, Full-formed, arose from the new young earth and sky. The breed, for instance, of the dappled birds Shucked off their eggshells in the springtime, as Crickets in summer will slip their slight cocoons All by themselves, and search for food and life. Earth gave you, then, the first of mortal kinds, For all the fields were soaked with warmth and moisture.
You had to take risks, follow some paths and abandon others.
It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
On this path let the heart be your guide.
Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionable spirit.
People don't really believe in words. Or rather, people believe in words only for a stretch of time. Then they start to look for action.
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