Be deaf, be blind, be dead to gossip, and it will grow disgusted with you and select a more sensitive victim.
Interpretation
Ignore gossip to make it lose interest in you.
This quote emphasizes the importance of disregarding gossip and negativity in one's life. By choosing not to engage with these toxic elements, you diminish their power and influence over you, ultimately making yourself a less attractive target for such behavior.
In practice
In a team meeting where negative talk is starting to arise.
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.
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
From naive simplicity we arrive at more profound simplicity.
Cunning... is but the low mimic of wisdom.
Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.
If it can be solved, there's no need to worry, and if it can't be solved, worry is of no use.
To understand matters rightly we should understand their details; and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.