A Quote by Florence King
In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.
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A human being is still more likely to die of a bee sting, snake bite or, Lord knows, automobile accident than by shark attack. We do not execute the perpretrators of death by car. We should not butcher an animal for an inadvertent homicide.
I hadn't been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called 'bee yard etiquette'. She reminded me that the world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.
Etiquette is all human social behavior. If you're a hermit on a mountain, you don't have to worry about etiquette; if somebody comes up the mountain, then you've got a problem. It matters because we want to live in reasonably harmonious communities.
Remember, it is not the snake bite that kills, but the venom which circulates afterwards that is fatal. Do not let the snake bite of another person release any venom inside of you. You can control its entry and you are responsible for every thought in your mind.
Like the bee, we distill poison from honey for our self-defense--what happens to the bee if it uses its sting is well known.
Etiquette is about all of human social behavior. Behavior is regulated by law when etiquette breaks down or when the stakes are high - violations of life, limb, property and so on. Barring that, etiquette is a little social contract we make that we will restrain some of our more provocative impulses in return for living more or less harmoniously in a community.
When a bee stings, she dies. She cannot sting and live. When men sting, their better selves die. Every sting kills a better instinct. Men must not turn bees and kill themselves in stinging others.
History is either a moral argument with lessons for the here-and-now, or it is merely an accumulation of pointless facts.
You never die from a snake bite, you can't be unbitten it's in the way, what continues to pour through you long after the bite has taken place.
Some guys like to undermine a girl's self-esteem with little verbal jabs. Eventually it all adds up. One bee sting doesn't hurt a horse, but enough bee stings can kill a horse.
To sacrifice the principles of manners, which require compassion and respect, and bat people over the head with their ignorance of etiquette rules they cannot be expected to know is both bad manners and poor etiquette. That social climbers and twits have misused etiquette throughout history should not be used as an argument for doing away with it.
But I'm in favor of every religion with the possible exception of snake-chunking. Anybody that so presumes on how he stands with Providence that he will let a snake bite him, I say he deserves what he's got coming to him.
On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.
The Honey is sweet, but the Bee has a Sting.
As much as the constitutional argument matters to me, what really matters to me is this sort of moral question of can we order somebody to risk their lives about a military mission if we're not willing to debate, vote, and say that the military mission matters?
I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
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