Tolerant Quotes

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

He who seeks to regulate everything by law is more likely to arouse vices than to reform them. It is best to grant what cannot be abolished, even though it be in itself harmful. How many evils spring from luxury, envy, avarice, drunkenness and the like, yet these are tolerated because they cannot be prevented by legal enactments.

A cultivated mind—I do not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties—finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it: in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind, past and present, and their prospects in the future.

Williams and others have also noticed that high openness appears strongly related to the ability to recover from stressful events. So what does it mean to be “open”? The trait is broadly characterized as comfort with novelty and desire for “cognitive exploration.” To measure it, psychologists use the extensive five-trait questionnaire called the NEO (the abbreviation stands for the first three categories: neuroticism, extraversion, openness). The openness category breaks down into five clusters of questions designed to gauge imagination and fantasy, adventurousness, attentiveness to inner feelings, tolerance of others’ viewpoints and ideas, and ability to appreciate and be moved by aesthetic experiences. People scoring high on openness really feel things, and they’re tuned in to how they’re feeling them.

A person should train himself not to overreact to the minor incidents or things that he hears or sees. When he trains himself to tolerate these little irritating experiences, this will (in time) become habitual and he will then be able to tolerate things that are more frustrating and experiences that are more annoying.

If a person comes to know the nature of his soul and the degree to which it can tolerate stress in dealing with problems, then he can decide, based on this knowledge, what kinds of problems he is ready to face and what problems he should avoid. This principle is applicable to all, whether a king or a commoner.

Sometimes parents will respond to this kind of honesty and neutrality by relating in a more emotionally genuine way. Though it may seem paradoxical, they may open up more once you stop wanting them to change. When you seem strong and they sense that you no longer need their approval, they may be able to relax more. As you stop trying to win their attention, the emotional intensity ebbs to a point where they sometimes can tolerate more openness. Because they’re no longer terrified that your needs will trap them in unbearable levels of emotional intimacy, they may be able to respond to you as they would any other adult, with more reasonableness and courtesy.

Relatedness is different from relationship. In relatedness, there’s communication but no goal of having a satisfying emotional exchange. You stay in contact, handle others as you need to, and have whatever interactions are tolerable without exceeding the limits that work for you. In contrast, engaging in a real relationship means being open and establishing emotional reciprocity. If you try this with emotionally immature people, you’ll feel frustrated and invalidated.