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 arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
Every rebellion against suffering is fed by the subversive power of remembered suffering.
Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.
He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.
War has been more common than peace, and extended periods of peace have been rare in a world divided into multiple states
There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
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