While everyone else is thinking about economics and politics, executive salaries and the future of the euro, do the opposite, even if it's hard. Invest in the spirit.
Interpretation
Focus on inner growth and spirituality rather than external factors like politics and economics.
This quote emphasizes the importance of prioritizing personal and spiritual development over the external distractions of economics and politics. In a world often consumed by material and financial concerns, it encourages individuals to invest in their inner selves, suggesting that true fulfillment and resilience come from nurturing one's spirit, even when it seems challenging to do so amidst societal pressures.
In practice
During a speech about mental health, one could quote this to emphasize the importance of nurturing oneβs spirit.
Stabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.
Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.
Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.
Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.
Being able to articulate the gospel with accuracy is one thing; having its truth captivate your soul is quite another.
[T]he more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer . . . [taking] away from before their eyes the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving them a dependence of somewhat else than a careful accumulation during youth and health for support in age and sickness.
We are all failures - at least the best of us are.
There are no means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying - and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone
If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.
TRUTHFUL, adj. Dumb and illiterate.
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