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.
It just is nothing foreign to consciousness at all that could present itself to consciousness through the mediation of phenomena different from the liking itself; to like is intrinsically to be conscious.
There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.
What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
When Ford sells a car, a dealer isn't allowed to take out the engine and put a different one in. When a newsstand sells the Washington Post, no one can go to the newsstand and pay them to rip out the classified section and put their own classified section in - if they could, they would do so.
How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink!
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