The Great Spirit will not make me suffer because I am ignorant. He will put me in a place where I shall be better off than in this world.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the belief that ignorance is not a reason for suffering and that there is a higher purpose or place for individuals beyond this life.
Red Cloud's quote emphasizes the idea that ignorance should not lead to suffering, suggesting that the Great Spirit (or a higher power) understands our limitations and will provide us with a better place or state of being than what we experience in our current world. It underscores a philosophy of compassion and the belief in a benevolent guiding force that accommodates human flaws and seeks to offer improvement or redemption.
In practice
In a speech about resilience, one might say, 'As Red Cloud reminds us, the Great Spirit will not make me suffer because I am ignorant.'
I am poor and naked, but I am the chief of the nation. We do not want riches but we do want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good. We could not take them with us to the other world. We do not want riches. We want peace and love.
When I was a young man, I was poor. In a war with other nations, I was in eighty-seven fights. There I received my name and was made Chief of my nation. But now I am old and am for peace.
We were told that they wished merely to pass through our country. . . to seek for gold in the far west . . . Yet before the ashes of the council are cold, the Great Father is building his forts among us. . . . His presence here is . . . an insult to the spirits of our ancestors. Are we then to give up their sacred graves to be allowed for corn?
Look at me. I was a warrior on this land where the sun rises, now I come from where the sun sets. Whose voice was first surrounded on this land - the red people with bows and arrows. The Great Father says he is good and kind to us. I can't see it.
Few men survey themselves with so much severity as not to admit prejudices in their own favor.
Maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything.
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.
Why was this heart of mine formed with so much sensibility! Or why not my fortune adapted to its impulses! Tenderness without a capacity of relieving only makes the man who feels it more wretched than the object which sues for assistance.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.