Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor.
Interpretation
Insecurity can distort perceptions and undermine trust between people.
Graham Greene's quote highlights how insecurity can lead to misunderstandings and erode the foundation of trust in relationships. In a tense environment, where individuals are constantly on guard, their fears and doubts can turn even loyal allies into perceived threats, ultimately harming interpersonal connections and communication.
In practice
This quote can be used in a seminar on trust-building in personal and professional relationships.
It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?
God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love.
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.
Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.
Suffering should not define you as a woman! And just because you’re a man it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect you! HELP HER to remove the taboos and the loneliness surrounding this disease; be understanding, show empathy, and don’t accuse her of being sensitive, delicate, or overly dramatic – this is a big opportunity for you guys to show that you care and to be a real man!
If there is no order in your relationship with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with your neighbour - whether that neighbour is near or very far away - forget about meditation.
Marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree.
I think women and children and older people are the three least-respected groups in our society.
I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy and the way we construct one another.
When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow, it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.
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