Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.
Interpretation
Living for others presents challenges, yet it enriches our lives and brings happiness.
This quote highlights the duality of life when it is lived in service to others. While the act of putting others first can lead to difficulties and complications, it ultimately infuses our lives with deeper meaning and fulfillment, resulting in a richer and happier existence.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a motivational speech on community service.
I do not want to frighten you by telling you about the temptations life will bring. Anyone who is healthy in spirit will overcome them. But there is something I want you to realize. It does not matter so much what you do. What matters is whether your soul is harmed by what you do. If your soul is harmed, something irreparable happens, the extent of which you won't realize until it will be too late.
Within every patient there resides a doctor, and we as physicians are at our best when we we put our patients in touch with the doctor inside themselves.
By ethical conduct toward all creatures, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the universe.
No one can give a definition of the soul. But we know what it feels like. The soul is the sense of something higher than ourselves, something that stirs in us thoughts, hopes, and aspirations which go out to the world of goodness, truth and beauty. The soul is a burning desire to breathe in this world of light and never to lose it--to remain children of light.
The mistake made by all previous systems of ethics has been the failure to recognize that life as such is the mysterious value with which they have to deal. All spiritual life meets us within natural life. Reverence for life, therefore, is applied to natural life and spiritual life alike. In the parable of Jesus, the shepherd saves not merely the soul of the lost sheep but the whole animal. The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows also that for spiritual life.
The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character.
HIV changed my life, but it doesn't keep me from living.
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.
As I go through life, I can see why my mother directed me that way, or why my father counseled me in that way. But some things you're open to when you're young, and some things you need to find out for yourself. I think that that's pretty universal.
I worry hope will crush me, the way love has so many times before. Are they so different, hope and love? O & E in the same place, half of the other in each word. Both swimming in unknowns. Iβve been through the big changes. These ones should seem easier in comparison, I should be more prepared, but they donβt and Iβm not. Sometimes I feel like a broken-wing butterfly, clinging to a window screen. Afraid to let go. Afraid to stay. Wondering how much wing is enough to fly.
Life goes by fast. Enjoy it. Calm down. It's all funny.
It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky.
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