Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Pain helps us recognize danger and prompts us to take action to protect ourselves.
This quote by Rebecca Solnit emphasizes the importance of pain in our lives. It suggests that pain is not merely something to be avoided, but rather a vital signal that alerts us to danger and encourages us to respond. By ignoring or suppressing pain, we risk overlooking important issues that require our attention and care, thereby putting ourselves in jeopardy.
Themes
PainDangerAwarenessSelf-CareSignal
In practice
Example use cases
During a workshop on mental health, you might share this quote to highlight the importance of recognizing emotional pain.
More from Rebecca Solnit
All quotes βI still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
Rebecca SolnitRead
We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
Rebecca SolnitRead
If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
Rebecca SolnitRead
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
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You are something new in this world. Never before, since the beginning of time, has there ever been anybody exactly like you; and never again throughout all the ages to come will there ever be anybody exactly like you again.
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Talk is cheap...It is the way we organize and use our lives everyday that tells what we believe in.
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Chess is not for the faint-hearted; it absorbs a person entirely. To get to the bottom of this game, he has to give himself up into slavery. Chess is difficult, it demands work, serious reflection and zealous research.
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The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.
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... one doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.
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