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.
What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
What I've come to know is that in life, it's not always the questions we ask, but rather our ability to hear the answers that truly enriches our understanding. Never, never stop learning.
Character is the ability of a person to see a positive end of things. This is the hope that a man of character has.
Most people use their energy attempting to rearrange circumstances that trigger painful emotions. Changing external circumstances will not change your rigid patterns of emotional response. That requires looking at the patterns themselves.
It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.
Blessed is the mind that jumps over and beyond its own conditioning and lands again into its natural state of unmoving awareness.
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