It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one.
Interpretation
Our shared imperfections create deeper connections and empathy among us.
This quote emphasizes the idea that human connection is often rooted in our flaws and mistakes rather than our successes or virtues. It suggests that recognizing our common shortcomings fosters a sense of unity and sympathy, highlighting the value of vulnerability in building relationships.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of vulnerability in relationships.
Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake. Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage that. It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous - almost of pedantic - veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.
Life is a thing to be lived, not spent; to be faced, not ordered. Life is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing; it is a game of cards, one's hand by skill to be made the best of.
It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick - on land. At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was to be sea-sick. Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a mystery.
There may be a better land where bicycle saddles are made of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard.
The world must be rather a rough place for clever people. Ordinary folk dislike them, and as for themselves, they hate each other most cordially.
A cat's got her own opinion of human beings. She don't say much, but you can tell enough to make you anxious not to hear the whole of it.
If you learn how to forgive others for not being strong, then people can learn how to forgive you for your own issues.
When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that society has cut off a segment of my freedom.
The prospect of dating someone in her twenties becomes less appealing as you get older. At some point in your life, your tolerance level goes down and you realize that, with someone much younger, there's nothing really to talk about.
Courtesies cannot be borrowed like snow shovels; you must have some of your own.
For just as some people want a purely spiritual Christ, without flesh and without the cross, they also want their interpersonal relationships provided by sophisticated equipment, by screens and systems which can be turned on and off on command. Meanwhile, the Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction.
She seemed to think that one of the perks of marriage was that it gave you rights of comment and intrusion over single people's love lives.
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