Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
Interpretation
We often prioritize our attention to illness and pain over kindness and knowledge, even though they are equally important.
This quote by Marcel Proust emphasizes the idea that people tend to react more strongly to their suffering than to the positive aspects of life such as kindness and knowledge. It suggests that while we acknowledge the importance of kindness and wisdom, it is often in times of pain that we truly listen and adhere to what life teaches us, illustrating the paradox of human nature where discomfort reveals our deepest attentiveness.
In practice
This quote can be used in a wellness seminar to highlight the importance of acknowledging pain while also embracing kindness and knowledge.
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
Be like the bluebird who never is blue, For he knows from his upbringing what singing can do
Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.
There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
Meditation is like a gym in which you develop the powerful mental muscles of calm and insight.
It's easy to pretend expertise when there's no data to contradict you.
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