Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
Walter BagehotRead
It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
Interpretation
Virtue is important, but facing challenges and temptations is essential for growth.
This quote suggests that while it is commendable to live without vices or negative habits, it is equally important to encounter temptations or challenges. Without temptations, one cannot truly understand their own strength and capacity for self-control, as growth often comes from overcoming obstacles and making choices in difficult situations.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal development, this quote could emphasize the importance of facing challenges.
Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.
Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.
Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.
Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone: but what we have requires no proof.
Everybody wants to reach the top of the mountain, but there is no growth at the peak. It is in the valley that we slog through the lush grass and rich soil, learning and becoming what enables us to summit life's next peak.
Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure
I compare it with a lie, which like to a snowball, the longer it is rolled the greater it becomes.
You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean and paltry; for whatever a man's actions are, such must be his spirit.
It is a great art to have an abundance of knowledge and experience - to know the richness of life, the beauty of existence, the struggles, the miseries, the laughter, the tears - and yet keep your mind very simple; and you can have a simple mind only when you know how to love.
Not being untutored in suffering, I learn to pity those in affliction
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