Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity.
Interpretation
Sacrificing one's ideals for the sake of fitting in leads to a loss of personal integrity.
This quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining one's character and integrity in the face of societal pressures to conform. Charles Spurgeon suggests that by prioritizing conformity and popularity over one's high ideals, individuals risk losing their true selves and the values that define them, ultimately leading to a degradation of personal character and authenticity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about the importance of staying true to oneself.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.
["All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.
The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.
I find increasingly that the more extreme are the things going on in your life, the more cultural reference points fail you. More mythical reference points actually help, and you realise that's what myths are for. It's for human beings to process their experience in extremis.
It doesn't sound too good to say I am the son of a landowner, so let us rather say I am the grandson of exploited Galician peasants.
If you do things, whether it's acting or music or painting, do it without fear - that's my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there's nothing to lose.
Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.
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