Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.
Interpretation
To create something positive, one must first understand its opposite or challenge.
This quote by Plutarch suggests that in order to create health through medicine, one must closely study disease. Similarly, in music, the creation of harmony necessitates an understanding and exploration of discord. This idea can be applied broadly, as it highlights the importance of comprehending difficulties or contrasts to foster growth and creativity in various fields.
In practice
In a speech on the importance of holistic health, one could quote this to emphasize understanding illnesses.
Sometimes small incidents, rather than glorious exploits, give us the best evidence of character. So, as portrait painters are more exact in doing the face, where the character is revealed, than the rest of the body, I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks of the souls of men.
It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such a one as is unworthy of him; for the one is only belief - the other contempt.
Come back with your shield - or on it
The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds.
For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.
Our senses through ignorance of Reality, falsely tell us that what appears to be, is. FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real
I see in the rising crescendo of ethnic tensions, civilization clashes and the use of religious justification for acts of terror, a clear and present danger to humanity.
The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man - and the dogma is the drama.
Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent...this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.
When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself.
We have to recognize that sin is a fact, not a defect; sin is red-handed mutiny against God. Either God or sin must die in my life...If sin rules in me, God's life in me will be killed; if God rules in me, sin in me will be killed.
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