The earth has grown old with its burden of care, But at Christmas it always is young.
Phillips BrooksRead
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.
Interpretation
Faith should encompass both an external deity and an internal spiritual presence.
Phillips Brooks suggests that true faith must recognize the divine both beyond and within oneself. If one only believes in a God that exists outside, without acknowledging the spiritual essence within, such faith lacks power and depth, rendering it ultimately ineffective in guiding one's life and understanding of spirituality.
In practice
During a spiritual retreat, this quote can be used to inspire self-reflection on oneβs inner belief.
The earth has grown old with its burden of care, But at Christmas it always is young.
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 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.
What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.
And that's why people read comics, to get away from the way life works, which is quite cruel and unheroic and ends in death.
Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward.
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.
We are still conditioning people in this country and, indeed, all over the globe to the myth of white superiority. We are constantly being told that we don't have racism in this country anymore, but most of the people who are saying that are white. White people think it isn't happening because it isn't happening to them.
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