Sweet is the voice of a sister in the season of sorrow.
Benjamin DisraeliRead
Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.
Interpretation
Moderation serves to balance ambition and success, offering comfort to those who feel lesser.
This quote by Benjamin Disraeli suggests that moderation is not just a personal trait but also a societal tool that can restrict the drive of ambitious individuals, while simultaneously providing solace to those who may feel inadequate in comparison to the great achievers. It highlights the dual role of moderation in both encouraging humility among the successful and fostering acceptance among the less fortunate.
In practice
During a public speech about the importance of balance in life, one might say this quote to emphasize the need for moderation.
Sweet is the voice of a sister in the season of sorrow.
But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.
Grief is the agony of an instant. The indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.
Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.
Yes, I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.
The practice of politics in the East may be defined by one word: dissimulation.
One day I visited a guy who had made a fortune as a broker. He was sitting in his office with his computer. I hire people from here and make deals from this room, he told me. Then he took me to the trading room. Nobody was talking to anybody else, the place was silent as a tomb, they were all sitting there watching their terminals - a great word, terminal. I tell you, it scares the crap out of me.
So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence β not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be β its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.
Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare.
Direct action is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.
The freedom to criticize judges and other public officials is necessary to a vibrant democracy. The problem comes when healthy criticism is replaced with more destructive intimidation and sanctions.
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