We ought all to make an effort to act on our first thoughts and let our unspoken gratitude find expression. Then there will be more sunshine in the world, and more power to work for what is good.
Interpretation
Expressing gratitude openly leads to a brighter world and empowers positive actions.
Albert Schweitzer encourages us to act on our initial impulses of gratitude and share our appreciation openly. By doing so, we not only brighten our own lives but also contribute to a more positive and powerful atmosphere, enabling ourselves and others to strive for goodness.
In practice
In a speech about community service, one might say, 'We ought all to make an effort to act on our first thoughts and let our unspoken gratitude find expression.'
I do not want to frighten you by telling you about the temptations life will bring. Anyone who is healthy in spirit will overcome them. But there is something I want you to realize. It does not matter so much what you do. What matters is whether your soul is harmed by what you do. If your soul is harmed, something irreparable happens, the extent of which you won't realize until it will be too late.
Within every patient there resides a doctor, and we as physicians are at our best when we we put our patients in touch with the doctor inside themselves.
By ethical conduct toward all creatures, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the universe.
No one can give a definition of the soul. But we know what it feels like. The soul is the sense of something higher than ourselves, something that stirs in us thoughts, hopes, and aspirations which go out to the world of goodness, truth and beauty. The soul is a burning desire to breathe in this world of light and never to lose it--to remain children of light.
The mistake made by all previous systems of ethics has been the failure to recognize that life as such is the mysterious value with which they have to deal. All spiritual life meets us within natural life. Reverence for life, therefore, is applied to natural life and spiritual life alike. In the parable of Jesus, the shepherd saves not merely the soul of the lost sheep but the whole animal. The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows also that for spiritual life.
The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character.
Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.
A fault is fostered by concealment.
There's no such thing as turning back the hands of time, and it makes me crazy that we live in a society where that's sold to women—that we're supposed to believe that if we're getting older, we've failed somehow, that we have failed by not staying young. I wish that women would let other women age gracefully and allow them to get older and know that as we get older, we become wiser.
Every true hustler knows that you cannot hustle forever. You will go to jail eventually.
But somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child -- a true self who is waiting.
When we learn from experience, the scars of sin can lead us to restoration and a renewed intimacy with God.
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