Learn to be pleased with everything, with wealth so far as it makes us beneficial to others; with poverty, for not having much to care for; and with obscurity, for being unenvied.
Interpretation
Embrace gratitude and contentment, regardless of your circumstances, recognizing their potential benefits.
This quote by Plutarch emphasizes the importance of acceptance and gratitude in life. It suggests that we should learn to be content with our situation, whether we possess wealth or are in poverty, and appreciate the benefits that each state can offer. Wealth can enable us to help others, poverty can free us from the burdens of excessive care, and obscurity can protect us from envy. This mindset encourages a focus on the positives in any circumstance and promotes a life of humility and service.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing life's challenges.
Sometimes small incidents, rather than glorious exploits, give us the best evidence of character. So, as portrait painters are more exact in doing the face, where the character is revealed, than the rest of the body, I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks of the souls of men.
It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such a one as is unworthy of him; for the one is only belief - the other contempt.
Come back with your shield - or on it
The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds.
For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.
Our senses through ignorance of Reality, falsely tell us that what appears to be, is. FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real
Yesterday is gone and tomorrow has not yet come; we must live each day as if it were our last so that when God calls us we already, and prepared, to die with a clean heart.
You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.
Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.
Our subconscious minds have no sense of humor, play no jokes and cannot tell the difference between reality and an imagined thought or image. What we continually think about eventually will manifest in our lives.
Great healers, people of divine realization, do not cure by chance but by exact knowledge.
Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.
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