We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed! What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired?
Seneca The ElderRead
The sun also shines on the wicked.
Interpretation
Good fortune and happiness can occur to anyone, regardless of their morality.
This quote by Seneca the Elder implies that life is impartial; it bestows blessings like sunlight on both the virtuous and the wicked alike. It serves as a reminder that good and bad people alike experience the joys and challenges of life, highlighting the randomness and fairness of nature.
In practice
In a discussion about justice, this quote could illustrate that life does not always reward good behavior.
We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed! What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired?
We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.
True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing.
Let us be brave in the face of adversity.
The courts of kings are full of people, but empty of friends.
What you think about yourself is much more important than what others think of you.
The forms are evanescent; but the spirit, being in the Lord and of the Lord, is immortal and omnipresent.
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.
Well, if Fortune be a woman, she's a good wench for this gear.
The wolf that one hears is worse than the orc that one fears.
The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.
We have a dangerous tendency to misunderstand, minimize, and even manipulate the gospel in order to accommodate our assumptions and our desires.
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