There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.Read
The great act of faith is when a man decides he is not God.
Interpretation
Recognizing our limitations and acknowledging a higher power is a fundamental act of faith.
The quote highlights the importance of humility and the understanding that humans are not omnipotent or omniscient. By acknowledging our limitations and the existence of a higher power or purpose, we can achieve a deeper sense of faith and clarity in our lives.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the importance of humility.
There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
If you don't know what you want, you will probably never get it.
Why should you row a boat race? Why endure the long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half hour that will leave you all but dead? Does anyone ask the question? Is there anyone who would not go through all the costs, and more, for the moment when anguish breaks into triumph or even for the glory of having nobly lost? Is life less than a boat race? If a man will give the blood in his body to win the one, will he spend all the might of his soul to prevail in the other?
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
The time will come when public opinion will no longer tolerate amusements based on the mistreatment and killing of animals. The time will come, but when? When will we reach the point that hunting, the pleasure in killing animals for sport, will be regarded as a mental aberration?
God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
Man always is perfect, or he never could become so; but he had to realise it.
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of 'I know.' Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.
But history will judge you, and as the years pass, you will ultimately judge yourself, in the extent to which you have used your gifts and talents to lighten and enrich the lives of your fellow men. In your hands lies the future of your world and the fulfillment of the best qualities of your own spirit.
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