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.
Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.
One must lose one's life to find it.
But far more numerous was the herd of such, Who think too little, and who talk too much.
Let nobody bribe you away from being yourself.
Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge - broad, deep knowledge - is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low.
It is great that even before we become enlightened or generate any lam-rim realizations we are able to offer incredible benefit to others. The person who does this is a very fortunate person and should rejoice very often.
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