Peace, like charity, begins at home.
Interpretation
True peace starts within our own lives and relationships before it can be extended to the world.
The quote emphasizes that the foundation of peace is cultivated in our personal lives and surroundings. Just as charity, or caring for others, must originate from a place of love and stability at home, peace must also be nurtured within our own hearts and communities. Only when we find and practice peace in our immediate environments can we hope to extend that peace outward to the broader world.
In practice
During a community meeting about conflict resolution, one might say this quote to emphasize the importance of resolving personal disputes first.
There has been one persistent theme through all Axis propaganda. This theme has been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power - but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite and work and fight. ... Let them tell that to the Marines!
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature.
When you find Peace within, you create a Peaceful world around you.
Peace is our gift to each other.
I never thought that the child who was a famous symbol of war would one day be invited to become a symbol of peace.
I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.
Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.
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