He will easily be content and at peace, whose conscience is pure.
Thomas A KempisRead
How seldom we weigh our neighbor in the same balance with ourselves.
Interpretation
We often judge others more harshly than we judge ourselves.
This quote by Thomas A Kempis emphasizes the tendency of individuals to evaluate their neighbors unfairly, often with a lack of compassion or understanding. It suggests that people frequently hold others to standards and expectations that they do not apply to themselves, encouraging a call for introspection and fairness in our judgments of others.
In practice
In a discussion about social justice, one might refer to this quote to highlight the importance of empathy and understanding in judging others.
He will easily be content and at peace, whose conscience is pure.
Trust not to your feelings for whatever they might be now, they will quickly be changed towards some other thing.
Jesus has many who love the kingdom of God, but few who bear a cross. He has many who desire His comfort, but few who desire His suffering. All want to rejoice with him, but few are willing to suffer for Him. He writes; there are many who admire his miracles, but there are few who follow in the humiliation of the cross.
Anyone who thinks hard work will never hurt you has never had to pay to have it done. Jesus now has many lovers of his Heavenly Kingdom, but few bearers of his cross.
He has great tranquillity of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men. He will easily be content and pacified, whose conscience is pure. You are not holier if you are praised, nor the more worthless if you are found fault with. What you are, that you are; neither by word can you be made greater than what you are in the sight of God.
For nothing, how little soever, that is suffered for God's sake, can pass without merit in the sight of God.
The man or nation of high culture may acknowledge to great lengths the restraints imposed by conventions and honour, but beyond a certain point, primitive will or desire cannot be curbed.
There is a thing inherent and natural which existed before heaven and earth. Motionless and fathomless, It stands alone and never changes; It pervades everywhere and never becomes exhausted. It may be regarded as the Mother of the Universe. I do not know its name. If I am forced to give It a name, I call it Tao, and I name it as supreme.
Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?
It is not man who is the enemy of the human species. It is the irrational; it is the spiritual when it is divorced from the material; from the lesson in one beating heart or one bleeding vein.
Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved.
A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages.
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