Man always travels along precipices... His truest obligation is to keep his balance.
Interpretation
Life is filled with challenges, and it is essential to maintain balance amidst them.
In this quote, Pope John Paul II highlights the precarious nature of life, suggesting that we often find ourselves at the edge of difficult situations. The metaphor of traveling along precipices implies that navigating life's challenges requires careful balance and deliberation. Our obligation, as suggested, is to remain steady and composed, ensuring that we do not succumb to the dangers that can lead to failure or distress.
In practice
A speaker at a leadership conference discussing the importance of maintaining balance in high-pressure situations.
True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.
Like so many pilgrims before us, we kneel in wonder and adoration before the ineffable mystery which. was accomplished here... In This Child - the Son who is given to us - we find rest for our souls and the true bread that never fails - the Eucharistic Bread foreshadowed even in the name of this town: Bethlehem, the house of bread. God lies hidden in the Child; divinity lies hidden in the Bread of Life
And everything else will then turn out to be unimportant and inessential except this: father, child, and love. And then, looking at the simplest things, we will all say, Could we have not learned this long ago? Has this not always been embedded in everything that is?
Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.
Man matures through work which inspires him to difficult good.
United with the angels and saints of the heavenly Church, let us adore the most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist. Prostrate, we adore this great mystery that contains God's new and definitive covenant with humankind in Christ.
'There are no easy pickings.' That would be a more accurate, less dramatic statement than 'There's no such thing as a free lunch.'
It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.
It's better to live cherishing a dream than face the possibilty that it might all come to nothing.
May we never risk the life of our souls by being resentful or by bearing grudges.
There is a universal respect and even admiration for those who are humble and simple by nature, and who have absolute confidence in all human beings irrespective of their social status.
Don't take guilt trips. Take a trip to the mall, to the next county, to a foreign country, but NOT to where the guilt is.
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