Show me your hands. Do they have scars from giving? Show me your feet. Are they wounded in service? Show me your heart. Have you left a place for divine love?
Fulton J. SheenRead
Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.
Interpretation
Jealousy arises from feelings of inadequacy and reflects the recognition of someone's exceptional abilities.
This quote by Fulton J. Sheen suggests that jealousy is often a response of those who do not possess exceptional talents or abilities. It indicates that rather than being a mere negative emotion, jealousy signifies an acknowledgment of someone else's genius, a tribute paid by those who feel inferior, revealing their own mediocrity in comparison.
In practice
In a discussion about how competition can foster creativity, this quote could highlight the feelings of jealousy that arise when comparing oneself to brilliant individuals.
Show me your hands. Do they have scars from giving? Show me your feet. Are they wounded in service? Show me your heart. Have you left a place for divine love?
A woman gets angry when a man denies his faults, because she knew them all along. His lying mocks her affection; it is the deceit that angers her more than the faults.
Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!
No one has ever laughed at a pun who did not see in the one word a twofold meaning. To materialists this world is opaque like a curtain; nothing can be seen through it. A mountain is just a mountain, a sunset just a sunset; but to poets, artists, and saints, the world is transparent like a window pane - it tells of something beyond....a mountain tells of the Power of God, the sunset of His Beauty, and the snowflake of His Purity.
The big print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.
Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt.
There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.
You'll never get anywhere unless you're independent of the good and bad opinion of others. Be fearless.
Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.
[I]t is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs, laugh like a fool β it drives the man to dancing... it even tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.
The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.
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