Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.
Caroline MyssRead
When we harbor negative emotions toward others or toward ourselves, or when we intentionally create pain for others, we poison our own physical and spiritual systems. By far the strongest poison to the human spirit is the inability to forgive oneself or another person. It disables a person's emotional resources. The challenge...is to refine our capacity to love others as well as ourselves and to develop the power of forgiveness.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Harboring negativity can harm both ourselves and others, and forgiveness is essential for emotional health.
This quote emphasizes the detrimental effects of negative emotions, both towards ourselves and others. Caroline Myss highlights that harboring such feelings can poison our spiritual and physical well-being, suggesting that the inability to forgive is particularly damaging. It calls for a conscious effort to cultivate love and forgiveness, which are crucial for emotional resilience and overall health.
Themes
ForgivenessNegative EmotionsLoveSpiritual HealthEmotional Resilience
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational talk about emotional well-being, one could use this quote to stress the importance of forgiveness.
More from Caroline Myss
All quotes →I am convinced that the deepest desire within each of us is to be liberated from the controlling influences of our own psychic madness or patterns of fear. All other things—the disdain of ordinary life, the need to control others rather than be controlled, the craving for material goods as a means of security and protection against the winds of chaos—are external props that serve as substitutes for the real battle, which is the one waged within the individual soul.
Caroline MyssRead
Healing is a different type of pain. It’s the pain of becoming aware of the power of one’s strength and weakness, of one’s capacity to love or do damage to oneself and to others, and of how the most challenging person to control in life is ultimately yourself.
Caroline MyssRead
Being of service is not an option, it is a biological necessity. Every kind of action we do for someone is a reanimation of our own life force - and of the other person's.
Caroline MyssRead
Similar quotes
A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on.
Mark TwainRead
Never laugh at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!" he said to himself, and it became a favourite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb. "You aren't nearly through this adventure yet," he added, and that was pretty true as well.
J. R. R. TolkienRead
I have cried even when the laugh did choke me. But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh he come just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, ‘May I come in?’ is not true laughter. No! He is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person, he choose no time of suitability. He say, ‘I am here.
Bram StokerRead
One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
We should use our imagination more than our memory.
Shimon PeresRead
You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Octavia ButlerRead