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.
I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; not the soldier's which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.
Be patient, even if every possibility seems closed.
Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience. Humans have learned only through mistakes.
Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [...] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.
There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
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