Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
A Morning Prayer The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man; help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day. Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of facing daily challenges with positivity and integrity.
In this morning prayer, Robert Louis Stevenson reflects on the mundane yet often irritating responsibilities of daily life. He calls for strength to approach these duties with a cheerful attitude and a sense of honor, requesting a peaceful end to the day and a restorative sleep. The emphasis is on balancing the grind of chores with a spirit of kindness and joy, highlighting the value of maintaining a positive demeanor through life's routine struggles.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a morning meeting to encourage a positive attitude amongst team members.
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.
That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters . . . I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.
Always seek less turbulent skies. Hurt. Fly above it. Betrayal. Fly above it. Anger. Fly above it. You are the one who is flying the plane.
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
The obvious choice isn't always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don't stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don't feel guilty about keeping it.
As a vulnerability researcher, the greatest barrier I see is our low tolerance for vulnerability. We're almost afraid to be happy. We feel like it's inviting disaster.
I wish people wouldn't think of me as a saint - unless they agree with the definition of a saint that a saint's a sinner who goes on trying.
So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.
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