I was early taught by sorrow to shed tears, and now when sudden joy lights up, or any unexpected sorrow strikes my heart, I find it difficult to repress the full and swelling tide of feeling.
Interpretation
Sorrow and joy are deeply connected; experiencing one enhances the ability to feel the other.
In this quote, Dorothea Dix reflects on how early experiences of sorrow have shaped her emotional responses. She suggests that the act of shedding tears in response to sorrow has made her emotional life richer, leading to an intense and sometimes overwhelming experience of joy and sadness. This speaks to the complexity of human emotions, where the ability to feel deep sorrow can enhance the joy when it arrives, thus making it difficult to control or repress one's feelings.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion on the emotional spectrum at a psychology seminar.
Steady, firm, and kind government of prisoners is the truest humanity and the best exercise of duty. It is with convicts as with children: unseasonable indulgence, indiscreetly granted, leads to mischiefs which we may deplore but cannot repair.
I shall be well enough when I get to Kentucky or Alabama. The tonic I need is the tonic of opposition. That always sets me on my feet.
Time passed solely in the pursuit of pleasure leaves no solid enjoyment for the future; but from the hours you spend in reading and studying useful books, you will gather a golden harvest in future years.
With care and patience, people may accomplish things which, to an indolent person, would appear impossible.
My wish is to be known only thru my work.
We are not sent into this world mainly to enjoy the loveliness therein, nor to sit us down in passive ease; no, we were sent here for action. The soul that seeks to do the will of God with a pure heart, fervently, does not yield to the lethargy of ease.
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.
Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.
Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were bloodstained - if you ate animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.
I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
This world is bullshit. And you shouldn't model your life — wait a second — you shouldn't model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we're wearing and what we're saying and everything. Go with yourself. Go with yourself.
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