Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
Interpretation
Exercise caution before making judgments or taking action.
This quote advises individuals to assess a situation thoroughly before responding or acting. Just as one would evaluate whether a substance is bread or stone before biting into it, we should take time to understand the nature of a situation to avoid unnecessary harm or regret.
In practice
In a discussion about making important life decisions, this quote serves as a reminder to analyze the potential consequences.
The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.
Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.
But if you'll prosper, mark what I advise, Whom age, and long experience render wise.
Sometimes river flows very strong, sometimes it flows very small, but it makes no difference to the ocean because it is satisfied in itself with its own quantity of water. Similarly, when our heart is cleansed with spirituality, we find pleasure and ecstasy with our own selves that is so sweet, so wonderful and so satisfying, that the so-called pleasures of this world no longer have any values, no appeal at all.
if we focus on what's ugly, we attract more ugliness into our thoughts, and then into our emotions, and ultimately into our lives
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, - a few men that I discovered by accident - I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.
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