Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Sorrow is a fundamental part of the human experience that deepens our understanding of life.
In this quote, Tennessee Williams emphasizes that experiencing sorrow is essential for genuine depth and understanding in life. Those who have never faced challenges may lack the emotional depth that comes from overcoming difficulties and appreciating the joys that follow.
Themes
SorrowHuman ExperienceDepthEmotionsLife
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about resilience, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of facing adversity.
More from Tennessee Williams
All quotes →Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
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Success and failure are equally disastrous.
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The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die — with my hand in the hand of some nice-looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch.
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Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.
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Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!
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Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That's all history is, after all: scar tissue.
Stephen KingRead
The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who, in the name of science, think they can explain everything in terms of our early hominid ancestors or our genes, with their combination of high-handed tone and disregard for history. Such reductive speculation encourages a really empty scientism.
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The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.
Victor HugoRead
What does it mean to know and experience my own “nothingness?” It is not enough to turn away in disgust from my illusions and faults and mistakes, to separate myself from them as if they were not, and as if I were someone other than myself. This kind of self-annihilati on is only a worse illusion, it is a pretended humility which, by saying “I am nothing” I mean in effect “I wish I were not what I am.
Thomas MertonRead
Water reflects everything it encounters. This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when in fact it has no color.... But the water, the glorious water everywhere, has taught me that we are more than what we reflect or love. This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are.
Mark NepoRead