If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the impact of suffering and how prolonged hardship can shape a person's character and emotions.
Arthur Golden's quote presents a poignant reflection on the nature of suffering and its effects on a person over time. It emphasizes the idea that even a brief moment of suffering can lead to strong emotions such as anger, thereby suggesting that extended periods of hardship could profoundly alter a person's psyche. By comparing human endurance to a stone being worn down by rain, the quote illustrates the gradual but inevitable impact of continual suffering, highlighting the resilience and malleability of the human spirit despite adverse experiences.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.
An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.
As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
So your first job is to work on yourself. The greatest thing you can do for another human being is to get your own house in order and find your true spiritual heart.
You are free, but you have to choose. An open oven bakes no bread
The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies.
Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it, even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself. I was demonstrating externally and irrefutably an inward condition.
In order not to leave any traces, when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do. You should not have any remains after you do something. But this does not mean to forget all about it.
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