Our chief defect is that we are more given to talking about things than to doing them.
Jawaharlal NehruRead
Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.
Interpretation
Life presents us with predetermined circumstances, but our choices define how we respond to them.
Jawaharlal Nehru's quote compares life to a game of cards, where the hand dealt represents the fixed elements of our existence, such as circumstances and genetics (determinism), while how we choose to play those cards symbolizes our exercise of free will. It highlights the interplay between fate and personal agency, suggesting that while some aspects of our lives are out of our control, we always have the ability to influence outcomes through our choices and actions.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
Our chief defect is that we are more given to talking about things than to doing them.
India has known the innocence and insouciance of childhood, the passion and abandon of youth, and the ripe wisdom of maturity that comes from long experience of pain and pleasure; and over and over a gain she has renewed her childhood and youth and age
Crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think.
What we really are matters more than what other people think of us.
Loyal and efficient work in a great cause, even though it may not be immediately recognized, ultimately bears fruit.
Failure comes only when we forget our ideals and objectives and principles.
If we must accept fate we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.
To be a Christian is a standing, a legal position. It means to be a child of God. You are or you are not, there is no try.
Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person.
Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.
If you ask me about my views on the environment, on women's rights, on gay rights, I am liberal. I don't have a problem with that at all. Some of my best friends are liberal.
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