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.
I think women are very complicated human beings, and I think there's an oversimplification of women when you see them on screen.
Science is about explaining the world, and religion is about interpreting it. There shouldn't be any conflict.
Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.
life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye.
Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.
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