The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.
Interpretation
True toughness is about adaptability and sensitivity, rather than sheer strength or stubbornness.
Gretel Ehrlich's quote challenges traditional notions of toughness and resilience. She suggests that real strength lies in the ability to adapt and accommodate, rather than in an unyielding mindset. Embracing vulnerability and tenderness, according to her, reveals a deeper, more profound form of fierceness. This perspective reframes our understanding of what it means to be tough, implying that sensitivity can coexist with strength.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech to emphasize the importance of adaptability in challenging situations.
Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly.
All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call "aware"--an almost untranslatable word meaning something like "beauty tinged with sadness.
Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.
Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.
This my goodness does to endow the souls of the just more fully with spiritual riches when for my love they are stripped of material goods because they have renounced the world and all its pleasures and even their own will. These are the ones who fatten their souls, enlarging them in the abyss of my charity. Then I become their spiritual provider. The Holy Spirit becomes their servant.
Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I'm also more exposed.
Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
I'll tell you," said Beatty, smiling at his cards. "That made you for a little while a drunkard. Read a few lines and off you go over the cliff. Bang, you're ready to blow up the world, chop off heads, knock down women and children, destroy authority. I know. I've been through it all.
But Christ's lore and his apostles twelve,_x000D_ He taught and first he followed it himself.
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