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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Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.
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Hope is critical to both faith and charity. When disobedience, disappointment, and procrastination erode faith, hope is there to uphold our faith. When frustration and impatience challenge charity, hope braces our resolve and urges us to care for our fellowmen even without expectation of reward. The brighter our hope, the greater our faith. The stronger our hope, the purer our charity.
Dieter F. UchtdorfRead
Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.
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Advice is unfriendly to learning, especially when it is sought. Most of the time when people seek advice, they just want to be heard. Advice at best stops the conversation, definitely inhibits learning, and at worst claims dominance.
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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
Susan SontagRead
Being, not doing, is my first joy.
Theodore RoethkeRead