Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul.
Interpretation
The truth can sometimes cause more pain than it alleviates.
This quote by Maxim Gorky suggests that revealing the truth or facing reality may not always lead to healing or resolution for someone who is suffering. Instead, the honesty can sometimes deepen their wounds or bring additional emotional turmoil, indicating that the process of healing is complex and may require more than just truth to mend a person's spirit.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about mental health and the challenges of facing difficult truths.
If it is true that only misfortune can awaken a man's soul, it is a bitter truth, one that is hard to hear and accept, and it is only natural that many people deny it and say it is better for a man to live on in a trance than to wake up to torture.
What I'd like is to meet a man I could take off my hat to and say: "Thank you for having got born, and the longer you live the better.
A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.
To speak the truth is the most difficult of all arts, for in its "pure" form, not connected with the interests of individuals, groups, classes, or nations, truth is almost completely unsuitable for use by the Philistine and is unacceptable to him.
Be good, be kind, be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong.
Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.
To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
We love the old saints, missionaries, martyrs, and reformers. Our Luthers, Bunyans, Wesleys and Asburys, etc... We will write their biographies, reverence their memories, frame their epitaphs, and build their monuments. We will do anything except imitate them. We cherish the last drop of their blood, but watch carefully over the first drop of our own.
The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
Men, however distinguished by external accidents or intrinsick qualities, have all the same wants, the same pains, and, as far as the senses are consulted, the same pleasures.
Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.
There is reason to suspect, that the distinctions of mankind have more show than value, when it is found that all agree to be weary alike of pleasures and of cares; that the powerful and the weak, the celebrated and obscure, join in one common wish, and implore from nature's hand the nectar of oblivion.
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