Quote of the Day: May Sarton on Life & Wisdom

It is 7:12 a.m., and your thumb hovers over the send button, an apology, a confession, the truth you keep rewriting into something safer. You can already feel the consequences: the awkward silence at dinner, the career risk, the relationship’s fragile weather. But the alternative is its own slow cost, another day lived slightly out of tune with yourself. In that tense pause, May Sarton offers a bracing permission slip: “True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.”

Sarton isn’t romanticizing impulse. She’s naming a hard fact about being human: the emotions we most want to edit, love, grief, devotion, anger, wonder, are often the only reliable compass we have. Practicality can predict outcomes; it cannot tell you what your life is for. “True feeling” is the interior evidence that something matters enough to risk change, embarrassment, rejection, or the ache of loss.

Modern life trains us to do emotional cost-benefit analysis: protect your image, preserve your options, keep everything “manageable.” Sarton's line rejects that utilitarian math. Some costs are not failures; they are the entry fee for integrity. To love deeply is to accept the possibility of heartbreak. To speak honestly is to invite misunderstanding. Yet without that willingness, we trade aliveness for control, and control is a poor substitute for meaning, especially in love and in courage.

May Sarton earned the right to say this. Across her poetry, novels, and unsparing journals, especially her writing on solitude, aging, and daily discipline, she treated emotional truth not as decoration but as the substance of a life.

On this December Wednesday, with the year’s end pressing people toward tidy conclusions and cautious resolutions, Sarton's counsel is sharper: don’t bargain away what you actually feel. Name it. Honor it. Then pay the price knowingly, because the bill for self-betrayal always comes due, too.