Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.
Interpretation
Only those who experience hardship can truly understand tenderness.
In this quote, Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that tenderness is a result of vulnerability and having faced adversity. The doves, being cared for and never endangered, have not faced any challenges that would allow them to feel and understand the depth of tenderness that arises from overcoming difficult experiences.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of resilience and sensitivity in leadership.
Spring has again returned. _x000D_ _x000D_ The Earth is like a child that knows many poems._x000D_ _x000D_ Many, O so many. For the hardship_x000D_ _x000D_ of such long learning she receives the prize._x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ Strict was her teacher. _x000D_ _x000D_ The white in the old man's beard pleases us._x000D_ _x000D_ Now, what to call green, to call blue,_x000D_ _x000D_ we dare to ask: She knows, She knows!
Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.
a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude
He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.
The only journey is the one within.
And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been
This very moment I may, if I desire, become the friend of God.
Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
I don't want a moratorium on the death penalty. I want the abolition of it. I can't understand why a country [USA] that's so committed to human rights doesn't find the death penalty an obscenity.
We act not for ourselves but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to show whether man can be trusted with self - government.
Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.
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