We never become truly spiritual by sitting down and wishing to become so. You must undertake something so great that you cannot accomplish it unaided.
Phillips BrooksRead
The earth has grown old with its burden of care, But at Christmas it always is young.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the contrast between the weariness of the earth and the rejuvenating spirit of Christmas.
Phillips Brooks suggests that while the earth bears the weight of its troubles and the passage of time, the Christmas season brings a sense of renewal and youthfulness. It highlights the joy and hope that the holiday season instills in people, providing a reprieve from the burdens of everyday life.
In practice
Use this quote during a holiday gathering to evoke the spirit of Christmas.
We never become truly spiritual by sitting down and wishing to become so. You must undertake something so great that you cannot accomplish it unaided.
The truest help we can render an afflicted man is not to take his burden from him, but to call out his best energy, that he may be able to bear the burden.
To believe in the God over us and around us and not in the God within us - that would be a powerless and fruitless faith.
To say, 'well done' to any bit of good work is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and strengthen them beyond our knowledge.
Think of life as a voyage. The truest liver of the truest life is like a voyager who, as he sails, is not indifferent to all the beauty of the sea around him.
It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.
If you look on the fungal genome as being soldier candidates protecting the U.S. as our host defense, not only for the ecosystem but for our population... we should be saving our old-growth forests as a matter of national defense.
What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.
My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
I wonder if anyone else has an ear so tuned and sharpened as I have, to detect the music, not of the spheres, but of earth, subtleties of major and minor chord that the wind strikes upon the tree branches. Have you ever heard the earth breathe?
Aurora now, fair daughter of the dawn, Sprinkled with rosy light the dewy lawn.
The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy...to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up." The ecological thought "...is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise.
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