A dozen confident steps are not the match of one taken fearfully.
From Taking Everything into Account, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
The fledgling in the hedge by the gas station went this morning, and I watched the whole clumsy business from the wire. He had been standing at the edge of the nest since Tuesday, shifting foot to foot, and the going itself lasted less than a second. His mother crossed that gap a dozen times an hour without thinking about it once. For years I believed the confident crossing was the real one and the frightened one was practice. A dozen confident steps are not the match of one taken fearfully, and I cannot say when I changed my mind about that, only that I watched him drop and catch and I did not feel like applauding his mother. He sat on the low branch afterward looking like he had been struck by something.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- No matter where you look for it, the sun only rises in the east.
- A know-it-all doesn’t and doesn’t know that he doesn’t.
- We have learned so much about how to make a better world, but not learned enough.
- The beginning of naming is the end of knowing.
- Call it what you will, it will be what it is.
- Life does not come with captions for a reason.