Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.
Interpretation
The capacity to learn is influenced by one's emotional and personal readiness.
This quote by Cormac McCarthy suggests that true learning requires more than just intellectual ability; it necessitates emotional engagement and a supportive mindset. If a personβs heart or emotional framework is not prepared to grasp certain lessons, they will struggle to comprehend or internalize them, highlighting the intrinsic connection between emotions and wisdom.
In practice
In a discussion about emotional intelligence and learning.
Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.
See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
When you have no experience of pain, it is rather hard to experience joy.
We have to do the best we are capable of. This is our sacred human responsibility.
Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by Him who is Himself the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.
It's alright, you can afford to lose a day or two
If ever we are going to be made into wine, we will have to be crushed; you cannot drink grapes. Grapes become wine only when they have been squeezed. I wonder what kind of finger and thumb God has been using to squeeze you, and you have been like a marble and escaped?
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