A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
Interpretation
Apologies should be sincere and heartfelt, not merely formalities.
This quote emphasizes that a genuine apology goes beyond just acknowledging wrongdoing; it requires an understanding of the emotional impact of that wrongdoing. The person who has been hurt seeks healing and emotional resolution, rather than just a superficial acknowledgment of the mistake.
In practice
During a team meeting to address conflicts, one might say this quote to emphasize the importance of honest apologies.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
Women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives in intimate association with their opressors.
My mom asked me one day at lunch in a very lovely and respectful way. I was finally comfortable enough to say yes, I was gay, and it really was never talked about again.
An unconscious, gentle process whereby people who want to be loving attempt to be so by telling little white lies, by withholding some of the truth about themselves and their feelings in order to avoid conflict. Pseudocommunity is conflict-avoiding; true community is conflict-resolving.
I wholeheartedly believe that we can't organize just as women. There has to be specific messaging and an issue prioritization based on identity groups. Because when you ask a black woman what her top priority issues are versus a white woman versus a Muslim woman versus an undocumented woman, you're going to get... different answers.
Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.
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