The Boy and the Nettles

Aesop

A Boy was gathering berries from a hedge when his hand was stung by a Nettle.

Smarting with the pain, he ran to tell his mother, and said to her between his sobs, “I only touched it ever so lightly, mother.”

“That’s just why you got stung, my son,” she said; “if you had grasped it firmly, it wouldn’t have hurt you in the least.”

From Aesop’s Fables: a new translation by V.S. Vernon Jones, with an introduction by G.K. Chesterton and illustrations by Arthur Rackham. 1912 edition. This work is in the public domain.