Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
Interpretation
Exercise caution before making judgments or taking action.
This quote advises individuals to assess a situation thoroughly before responding or acting. Just as one would evaluate whether a substance is bread or stone before biting into it, we should take time to understand the nature of a situation to avoid unnecessary harm or regret.
In practice
In a discussion about making important life decisions, this quote serves as a reminder to analyze the potential consequences.
The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.
Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it
When life is good and we have no problems, we can almost let ourselves believe we have no need for God. But in my experience, sometimes the richest blessings come through pain and hard things.
It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
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