The good are better made by ill, As odours crushed are sweeter still.
Interpretation
Adversity can enhance the goodness in people, much like crushed flowers can emit a stronger fragrance.
This quote reflects the idea that challenges and negative experiences can foster growth and resilience in individuals. Just as flowers release a sweeter scent when crushed, people often show greater strength and character when they face difficulties, revealing their true goodness in the process.
In practice
A motivational speech discussing how challenges shape us into better individuals.
Almost all men are over anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste for natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor and on they go as their fathers went before them till weary and sick at heart they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood.
Sweet Memory! wafted by thy gentle gale, Oft up the stream of Time I turn my sail.
Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite
Don't think that because you have to go down in the wash-tub that you are any less a lady!
Commend me to sterling honesty though clad in rags.
Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.
It is great that even before we become enlightened or generate any lam-rim realizations we are able to offer incredible benefit to others. The person who does this is a very fortunate person and should rejoice very often.
Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.
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